9th May, 2011 
Q: What do you think is culturally the MAIN reason that Africa has been so slow to catch up with the rest of the world economically?
A: I am afraid I find the premise of the question a little naïve. In the first place Africa is not a single country and certainly does not have a single culture. Africa is indeed a construct of the West. The reality is that the continent has 54 countries and at least 800 cultures. These countries are in different economic and historic circumstances. For example, Ethiopia adopted Christianity as a state religion in the third century whereas Zambia did not do so until the 1990s. Ethiopia was never colonised, having militarily overcome Italian attempts to do so in 1896. On the other hand most African countries were overrun very quickly by the colonial powers. In the medieval world, there were only about five top universities in the world; they were Oxford, Timbucktu, Djenee, Cambridge, and Bologna. You will note that two of these were in Africa. This alone surely proves that the continent need not lag behind anyone.
I would suggest you confine your question to Zambia. If that is the case, I would respond that there are three cultural impediments to development in our country. The first is colonialism which undermined people’s confidence and instilled into them a culture of underperformance and feelings of inferiority, in addition to destroying traditional institutions of government and creating new institutions that were alien and therefore had to evolve. This is not the first time this phenomenon had occurred in history. There is evidence of this from the London colonial experience. After the Roman conquest, many Londoners believed themselves incapable of great achievement. This mentality was not entirely banished until about a century after Roman colonialism
The second impediment is that Zambia had a particularly inept leader after independence. The leader and many of his colleagues were very innocent in basic economics. There were of course exceptions but in general the new Zambian regime underestimated the importance of free enterprise and the criticality of using the capitalist machinery to generate profits that would in turn finance social services.
The last impediment I would refer to is related to the second. In the absence of a strong private sector a culture of unhealthy and destructive competition for jobs in the public sector emerged. People were promoted not on the basis of merit but on their ability to kow tow to political masters. Very quickly the entrepreneurial spirit was replaced by a culture of jealousy and intolerance toward merit based success. In the meantime, in response to the claim that the state would provide everything for Zambians, a deep subculture of dependency came into being. Zambians thus learnt to look to the state for their basic needs; when the state failed to deliver, they looked to foreigners for largesse; having in the meantime convinced themselves that they were not as able as other nationalities. In the circumstances there was little innovation and people based industry.
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Insightful article!
First, congrats for your achievement. Good answer. Yes, we can achieve anything once we change our mind and start to believe that we are just as good as people of other cultures. Yes, we can develop once we start to say goodbye to the spirit of dependence and corruption etc. Yes, we can develop and not lag behind once we start to be innovative. We also could have been like South Korea or Malaysia today.
Last , thanks to Mr Chisala for being for hosting this blog. But why call it National Blogs when this one is just one single Blog. Why not just call it: Zambia National Blog?
Thank you Myday.
We’re calling it Zamblogs (plural) because it is planned to host many different blogs by other Zambians, as it evolves.
This is an insightful article. Unfortunately, having identified plausible reasons for our collective inability to climb out of the abyss of underdevelopment, the author shied away from addressing current issues which prevent us from forging ahead. Having started by addressing the legacy of colonialism, the author rightly apportioned a fair amount of blame on our post-independent leadership. However, when the democratic winds of change blew our way, we had the opportunity to turn a new leaf and bravely step into the post-socialist world.
The initial signs were positive, given that our second leader facilitated the liberalisation of our economy. Having got to that point, our leader lost his way and fostered a whole new culture of self service among the political elite. We have been rid of our first (socialist) government for 20 years and there is no sign of a change in course towards economic prosperity.
Unless the esteemed author has a sequel in store, I am afraid this article is incomplete.
Is Africa a construct of the West?
Response to Chisanga Puta-Chekwe.
(This was intended to be an article, hence it’s length.)
I do agree that sometimes non-Africans think that they have gained a special insight into all Africans once they just expose themselves to one African country for a short time. I have even seen researchers who have made conclusions about “African habits” that I had no recognition of as a Zambian, but which were probably true about the Nigerians they had met in their research, if not just one Nigerian tribe. The very experienced anthropologists who have traveled to many African countries will agree with you that it is usually a fallacy to automatically extrapolate your observations about one African group to broad holistic conclusions about “African culture.”
But whereas this is a common fallacy, it is also not true that there is nothing at all in common among (sub-Saharan) Africans, culturally, which (negatively) could also explain a conspicuous failure in their economic struggles or (positively) could explain their universal artistic creativity. Thus, I don’t think it is a fallacy to ask “Africans” to get rid of the negative and anachronistic aspects of their culture while encouraging the positive aspects. In this sense, I do not think that Africa is a mere academic construct of the West.
In fact, it seems to me that at some level, one can argue that the 54 countries are more an invention of the West than Africa itself.
So if you are saying we can’t ever lump everyone in Africa into one culture because there are over 800 cultures, I agree, if one is merely extrapolating one of those 800 cultures to the whole. However, this doesn’t mean you can never speak of an African culture. If that was the case then you can’t even lump the different cultures in one country into one national culture (if there are 54 countries and over 800 cultures, then definitely each country has on average more than one culture). So, if Zambia has many cultures, how can we say “Zambian culture”?
Now, I understand why you would feel you can integrate all cultures within Zambia into a bigger “Zambian culture,” despite the fact that Zambian borders are a construction of the West. The reality, as you correctly suggested, is that the country has had a common history that is distinct from the history of the next country, and this in itself has created a certain distinct culture among the people within its borders, even if they also have other “sub-cultures” inside.
But by this same reasoning, you can certainly say that the continent has had a common history that is distinct from other continents (like Europe), even if each of these nations also have histories that differ in some details or at some point. History, in short, can be abstracted on different levels, and this will yield a certain specific culture at each level of abstraction. People in one town can have a certain shared history, people in one ethnic group, people in one country, and even one continent, or at least a part of the continent. Sometimes you even have this transcending continents — there is something culturally in common among former British colonies around the world that is culturally different from say, former French colonies.
Former Eastern bloc Europeans have a certain common culture that is rather distinct from West Europeans. Within Germany, there are people who were formerly in East Germany and people from West Germany. Their “genes” are the same and their history before the East-West divide was the same, but they developed different cultures as a result of what happened in modern history. And yet they also have some common enduring German culture that extends beyond that recent historical detour, which one can decide to take as a cultural framework.
African nations do share a common history that could be responsible for certain similarities in their cultures. So, some of the observations you make about Zambia seem to be true across almost all African countries (which justifies a degree of generalization). How many African countries were not ruled by a dictator? How many countries did not pursue utopian socialist policies? How many did not subsequently become corrupt kleptocracies?
But it also just so happens, I think, that people in proximity usually influence each other especially when they identify themselves as a unit (in this case, as Africans), which can also result in certain cultural similarities. African leaders certainly influenced each other, not only in their pursuit of independence, but even in the way they governed their countries. The first set of leaders, for example, tried to think of themselves as philosopher kings, taking a cue from early leaders like Kwame Nkrumah. Kenneth Kaunda visited neighboring president Julius Nyerere a number of times to learn how to also create and implement his own brand of socialism (in short, he copied his original idea!). Nyerere called his system “Ujamaa,” Kaunda called it “Zambian Humanism” (and both systems created historically unprecedented depths of poverty among the people they were experimented on).
In Zambia, we had ‘Zambianization’ imposed by government as a corporate policy (which meant progressively transferring jobs from Europeans to indigenous Zambians), happening mostly on the Copperbelt Province. Just near the Copperbelt, the neighboring country there had a policy of ‘Zaireanization.’
And even the ultimate deposition of these leaders was influenced by this geographical proximity. In one region of Africa, military coups were common, and this only made leaders in other parts of the continent more alert as they expected that trend to spread across regions (they built coup-proof underground security tunnels in some cases!) After experimenting with one-party states, in the 90′s many countries across the whole continent adopted democratization. This apparently did not affect some countries in the north which see themselves as a bit different from “Africans.”
But even the North Africans have shown that they are not immune to mutual influence of countries in close proximity as they have engaged in revolution against their leaders in a short period of time, taking a cue from Tunisia which got rid of their leader earlier in the year. It’s not a coincidence that this “revolution” is limiting itself to countries that self-identify as “Arab.” And as a result, this historical event will have an impact of the new culture that will emerge in this whole region, not just in one country in the region.
Interestingly, when Gaddafi hired some mercenaries to shoot at his own people, Libyans were shown on TV complaining that Gaddafi had “hired Africans to kill us.” They don’t really consider themselves Africans (the Confederation of African Football should take note!), which explains certain cultural differences with the rest of Africa.
But anyway, it is from this background that I think that there are times when one can validly talk about “African culture” (which normally means black sub-saharan culture). How many African countries do not have a large section of society that still believes in consulting a witch doctor or ancestral spirits?
Or to take one random but pernicious example that involves even “modernized” sections of Africa, there is one big cultural problem that transcends the temporal national borders of Africa: time keeping. What we colloquially call “Zambian time” (not taking a time appointment seriously, or just not showing up at all) is called “Nigerian time” in Nigeria, “Ghanaian time” in Ghana, “Zimbabwean time” in Zimbabwe, and so on (I actually googled all these terms!). Some African student intellectuals have “patriotically” defended this culture and claimed that the West just wants to colonize our minds by criticizing our unique African attitude to time (of course the same students would never dare submit that same “afrocentric” thesis a day late to their university!)
Whilst I would agree that Kaunda embraced nationalisation and underestimated the benefits of free enterprise, I think we should bear in mind that much of the wrold was doing the same in the late 60s and through the 70s. The problem for Zambia was that we did not change, because of the political situation, when Europe realised the failure of its nationalisation. But today many Europeans wonder about the benefits of consumerism and the so-called free market…..
Rogue Trader,
The experiences that our forebears went through had a lasting effect that would take several generations to erase from our collective psyche. That condition is generally referred to as [internalized oppression]. Your observation was spot on when you stated that our first President secured liberty for us. But that is only geography. The real battle begins after that; the freeing of the mind. We are yet to achieve that. This is an absolute essential ingredient for development – to think our own thoughts. And more importantly, to define ourselves and chart the course of our own history.
Zambians are blessed with a great innate will to survive and persever as an individual, community and a nation. Over the years since independance we have faced so much hardship but survived were other countries collapsed. We as country should look to the past and learn from it, move on take responsibility for ourselves as individuals and as a nation, we have come so far, we should move on. It annoys me when people blame the past for the present. Blame archives nothing! This is the situation we are in today right here right now! The situation is “Neutral” we have a choice on how to move on from here. With all the information I have from the past how can I do things different now to change for the better?
Insanity can be described as ” Doing the same thing, over and over again expecting a different answer”
Yes colonisation occurred, oppression blah! ! Horrible but it is not the case now! What can we do for ourselves and our country? No one else will do it for us.
The first president got a lot wrong, however one thing that I will never forget he instilled in me was this ” We walk together with one heart….we are together”
Why have we not had a civil war? Simple from what I just stated above.
This sense of togetherness was absolutely evident in the African cup of nations.
We can achieve so much when we work together, we have everything we need to achieve and nothing we strive for is going to be freely given.
Why is Africa so behind from the west? Buggared if I know!? What I do know is that Zambia is not, we survided colonisation, corruption, HIV, Malaria, Zimbabwe, global financial crisis. Inflation now at 6%. Look at Greece, Libya, Syria
Draw a realistic comparison of countries with a population of 13000000. How many of them in Africa and the west have achived what we have. Not many my friends! ” behind?” I beg to differ!
“We have to become the change we want to see! Our experience of that is governed by the changes we make!”
We should not regret the past or shut the door on it!
Kunfu panda .. “inner peace”
I picked my son from school and he said to me” Daddy! I am really happy today!”
I asked him why? Expecting somthing profound and insightful! He looked at me and rolled his eyes then said ” Because I am not said!” He is 3 years old.
Just discovered this site!
Interesting article.
However, I side with Dr Dambisa Moyo in disagreeing with the usual excuse that Zambia’s delay in development rests within our colonial history, oil crisis of the 70′s, KK’s nationalization policies, our inferiority complex, etc. I think this country has had the potential and opportunity to reverse those trends but has had them squandered through corruption. Millions of dollars in aid, debt relief and soft loans dissipating thoughout the political and NGO system without proper accountability!
Indeed its about changing our mind set, the answer to Zambia’s and Africa’s prosperity lies there, the next question would be how do we start….this raises another question and that of leadership. The bottom line is ….we need a revolution in our way of political leadership and social and economic values.