„How Africa Works“ by Joe Studwell – and how it does not. A Book Review

How not to write about Africa should be clear after the late Binyavanga Wainaina’s wonderful parody “How to write about Africa” from 2005. Do not treat this vast and complex continent as if it were one country, so his plea. How not to treat Africa should also be obvious after the British “Economist” changed its tune from “The Hopeless Continent” in 2000 to “A Hopeful Continent” in 2013 – and thus getting things wrong twice. But how do you then review an excellent book with the nevertheless preposterous title “How Africa Works” by Joe Studwell another thirteen years on? Well, let’s try! 

To start with, the journalist and academic Joe Studwell approaches Africa from Asia about which he had written the much-recognized book “How Asia Works” (2013). That is, he approaches the vast African continent as a know-nothing taking the reader through the statistical and analytical homework he had to do before setting out to write. The reason for his bold enterprise? As a consultant Studwell had been asked to write an African sequel to his Asian bestseller by the ambitious and curious leaders of Ethiopia and Ruanda who wanted to emulate the success stories of Singapore or South Korea on African soil. So why is Africa still poor, they wanted to know. 

Studwell comes up with three main reasons. Firstly, because the continent has always been severely underpopulated and will only reach South Korea’s population density of 1960 by 2030. This longstanding demographic disadvantage is nothing new and has been described elsewhere, as in John Reader’s fantastic account “Africa – A Biography of the Continent”. But this insight has recently been overshadowed by European immigration fears, stoked by authors like Stephen Smith in “Nach Europa!” (2018), who have been outlining the threatening scenario of an alleged African overpopulation flooding into a hapless Europe. 

Secondly, because of what Studwell calls “low-budget colonialism”. This mainly extractive and often short-lived experiment in exploitation, as it had been practiced in extreme brutality by the Belgians in Congo and the German occupiers of Tanzania, left most African colonies at independence with much lower levels of education and expertise compared to Asia. In short, Kenya was not India where the structure of a basic civil service survived independence and partition. 

The third factor for Africa’s poverty is a limiting set of initial development conditions borne of the first two. As a result of state weakness, low budgets and even lower literacy rates, plus the racist legacy of white settler communities in some places, many African countries started their post-colonial existence within ethnically incongruent borders and with no more than a few dozen doctors, engineers and teachers; Tanzania’s founding father Julius Nyerere being one of the latter. I remember the Congolese father of a good friend telling me that from his travels as an engineer in the early 60s he knew most of Africa’s leaders personally, so small where the educated elites and political circles in Kinshasa, Dar-es-Salaam, Akra and Dakar, the members of which had to embark on post-colonial state building under adverse conditions. 

For Studwell “it is the combination of these three sets of impediments - rather than more popularly cited ones such as corruption and ethnic violence – that have placed a ceiling over Africa’s economic prospects”. 

In this first part of the book Studwell excels at summarizing his seven years of research, presenting but also questioning data, reciting and refuting common theories, but also coming up with his own ideas, exposing prejudices and testing his own comparisons to the developments in Asia for what they might be worth. This all amounts to a perfect introduction for readers who are not experts in African matters but still want to know about “success and failure on the world’s last developmental frontier”, as the book’s subtitle reads. 

In a way Studwell first summarizes what does not work in Africa and why it doesn’t. But he avoids the deterministic judgments of others and the cynical tone so prevalent in many “expert” accounts of the quite often dismal state of African countries. He does not blame all the ills he finds on colonialism, nor does he lay most of the blame for the lack of development at the palace doors of corrupt African elites. Instead, his analysis is nuanced, and he is trying to stay as neutral as a Western observer could be. 

Part II of the book looks at four countries which have managed to achieve remarkable economic progress after independence – Botswana, Mauritius, Ethiopia and Ruanda – and why. Here too, Studwell refrains from making moral judgements about the democratic price paid for their impressive growth trajectories and focusses on structural factors explaining their relative economic success. 

In Botswana it was a “coalition for national economic development” established under its first President Seretse Khama which managed to negotiate international mineral contracts and other agreements, advantageous to this small nation sitting on valuable reserves of diamonds. But it remains a deeply unequal and divided country which, which therefore needs, as Studwell writes, “a developmental coalition with a plan for growth that is inclusive”. 

In Mauritius it was “an impressive brown-black-white-Hindu-Muslim-Christian political coalition” which forced the Franco-Mauritius sugar barons to finance development through taxes. Today Mauritius always ranks high on human development indices and might be the best governed country in Africa. Yet with its textile industry and luxury tourism, Studwell notes, it has not yet managed to follow the example of Asian countries nto a more advanced industrial level. 

Ethiopia’s development has come closest to Studwell’s Asian formula for economic success: the prioritisation of agriculture, followed by an industrial strategy, all hedged by some forms of capital controls. It was Ethiopia prime minister Meles Zenawi, an eager student of East Asia, who made the state invest in agricultural extension, supporting smallholder farmers; who later built industrial parks and started the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam; and who lead this country of  (today) 135 Million people to economic growth rates between 6-12 % from 1991 to his death in 2012 – and onwards. Yet in November 2020 Ethiopia’s encouraging economic experiment was cut short by war. 

For Studwell “the Tigray war was the biggest developmental tragedy in Africa for a generation” because it also finished the “demonstration effect” of such a remarkable trajectory from poverty to growth. He blames Meles Zenavi’s naïve and Marxist idea that ethnic conflict is simply a result of economic exploitation which made the prime minister create a federal system that in the view of many just could not work. Yet even after a war that killed 600.000 people Studwell is hoping that Ethiopia’s dream is not destroyed but only delayed: if President Abiy can reintegrate Tigray, get Eritreas’ leader Isaias Afwerki “out of Ethiopian politics”, and find a solution to the other virulent ethnic conflict in Southern Amhara and neighbouring parts of Oromia. That is a big “if”. The chapter on Ethiopia is the only part of the book where the author’s otherwise sober analysis is tinged by some wishful thinking. 

And lastly Rwanda, a small landlocked and overpopulated former Belgian colony with a recent genocide and a smart and wily president who knows how to play his cards with the West: those being victimhood, impressive economic growth, and a stable but repressive political order. After the killing of 800.000 ethnic Tutsi which Paul Kagame’s advancing rebel army RPF could not prevent in the summer of 1994, he took the reins in a country devasted by ethnic violence which had some indigenous but mainly colonial roots. Explicitly following the Singaporean model, Kagame’s regime invested in manufacturing and services leading to growth rates of about 8 %. From traffic regulation to gender policies some areas of political progress have also been exemplary. At the same time President Kagame has members of the political opposition killed in Kigali and abroad. Yet, if you ask ordinary citizens in neighbouring Tanzania and Uganda, many will prefer Kagame’s rule to what they find at home. 

Studwell calls the Rwandan regime “brutal, but developmental”. He questions some of the economic data without minimising the achievement of steady growth. He rates Kagame as a “spin dictator” because of his skills to receive “more aid per capita than almost any other African state” despite Rwanda’s pernicious and extractive role in the Congo-crisis and his repressive rule at home. In the end Studwell points to Rwanda’s longer-term problem which we have seen unfolding in Ethiopia after the death of Meles Zenawi: “What will happen when the charismatic leader who held the project together by sheer force of personality and fear is gone?” Will economic growth still prevent ethnic strife? 

Together all four of Studwell’s case studies are well researched, highly interesting, nuanced and at times revelatory, but neither of them can serve as a blueprint for development in other African countries because of unique factors shaping the relative success stories of Botswana, Mauritius, Ethiopia and Rwanda. Still, there are enough lessons to learn. 

Studwell’s “to do list” comprises “a developmental coalition to quieten ethnic division, smallholder agriculture, manufacturing, and appropriate financial arrangements (including the prudent use of mineral and hydrocarbon rents”. And there are signs that its possible implementation is not purely wishful thinking. He views “a demographic thickening” and “a world beating pace of urbanisation” plus cheap labour costs and mineral wealth as enabling factors for a transition from poverty to economic progress. He also detects “the slow rising of the African state”, “improving leadership” and “more democracy than Europe or Asia experienced at a similar level of income”. But Studwell is realistic enough to understand that most African countries are not going to become developmental states “but still can move the policy needle a little bit in a number of different areas”. 

Even on the often lambasted “well-meaning white people” he takes a measured view. He is adopting some of the points put forward by the most prominent critics of international aid like William Easterly (The White Man’s Burden) and Dambisa Moyo (Dead Aid). Yet he faults their analysis for their “fantasy comparison” to development in East Asia, ignoring the fact that it was international aid that initially spurned the success stories of South Korea and Taiwan. 

Studwell calls the aid sector a “fashion business” and faults USAID for giving up on pure “development aid”, long before President Trump cut its budget by 90 %. He criticizes Western bilateral aid for never supporting agriculture, land reforms, or farmers collectives and blames the rich donor states of the UN for designing the Millenium Development Goals without the involvement of African states. But despite those failings of the aid sector – “many of them ideologically self-inflicted by rich nations” - Studwell gives examples where aid has not been a waste, but where it has generated positive change, significant health improvements and furthered general economic growth. 

For Studwell there is no denying: “Africa is coming on to the world’s radar as never before”. As he sees it, for the world’s multinationals the African continent will be “the planet’s last great frontier market”. Along this frontier Africa’s growth will continue, if in a fragmented way. Donald Trump’s “shithole countries” from Mauritania through the northern Sahel to Somalia will continue to struggle with political instability and poverty. But “regions like East Africa and coastal parts of West Africa – across Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, Benin and Nigeria, plus Senegal in the north – will be hubs of growth with populations of hundreds of millions”, Studwell writes. If reaching the African Development Bank’s target of $ 4.500 GDP per capita by 2060 (another big “if”), the continent’s economy would be approaching the size of China’s economy today. In the future, he surmises, “the rich world will speak not of Africa as a troubled continent, but of parts of it troubled and parts of it promising”. 

You might not agree to all of Studwell’s predictions, yet the gist of his argument is convincing. “If you live outside Africa – whether in the Americas, Europe or Asia – Africa is going to be a bigger part of your life”. This is indeed a statement and an observation that we Europeans would ignore at our own peril. Studwell’s book is an excellent point of departure to take notice of how Africa might work.