Written by Keith Hart
The classical liberal revolutions were sustained by three ideas: that freedom
and economic progress require increased movement of people, goods and
money in the market; that the political framework most compatible with
this is democracy, putting power in the hands of the people; and that social
progress depends on science, the drive to know objectively how things
work that leads to enlightenment. For over a century now an anti-liberal
tendency has disparaged this great emancipatory movement as a form of
oppression and exploitation in disguise; and, in common with many social
revolutions, it this is partially true. Africa today must escape soon from
varieties of Old Regime that owe a lot to the legacy of slavery, colonialism
and apartheid; but conditions there can no longer be attributed solely to
these ancient causes. It is possible that the example of the classical liberal
revolutions, reinforced by endogenous developments in economy,
technology, religion and the arts, could offer fresh solutions for African
underdevelopment. These would have to be built on the conditions and
energies generated by the urban revolution of the twentieth century.
We all know of course that power is distributed very unequally in our world
and any new liberal movement would soon run up against entrenched
privilege. In fact, world society today resembles quite closely the Old
Regime of agrarian civilization, as in eighteenth century England and
France, with isolated elites enjoying a lifestyle wildly beyond the reach of
masses who have almost nothing. It is not just in post-colonial Africa where
the institutions of agrarian civilization rule today. Since the millennium, the
United States, whose own liberal revolution once overcame the Old Regime
of King George and the East India Company, seemed to have regressed to
presidential despotism in the service of corporations like Haliburton.
It has long been acknowledged that the rise of capitalism in Europe drew
heavily on religion as one of its motors. Max Weber insisted that an
economic revolution of this scope could only take root on the back of a
much broader cultural revolution. If Africa’s informal economy has the
potential to evolve into a more dynamic engine of urban commerce, what
might be the cultural grounds for such a development? As I said, whatever
happens next must build on what has already been put in place. The basis
for Africa’s future economic growth must be the cultural production of its
cities and not rural extraction or the reactionary hope of reproducing
capitalism’s industrial phase. This in turn rests on:
1. The energy of youth and women
2. The religious revival
3. The explosion of the modern arts
4. The communications revolution
5. The new African diaspora linked to sub-national identities
I can only sketch an outline of what is a book-length argument.
- African societies, traditional and modern, have been dominated by older
men. Women have benefited less from their opportunities and are less tied
to their burdens. In many cases they have been quicker to exploit the
commercial freedoms of the neo-liberal international economy. Even when
men and boys have plunged whole countries into civil war, thereby
removing state guarantees from economic life, an informal economy
resting on women’s trade has often kept open basic supply lines. The social
reality of Africa’s cities is a young population without enough to do and a
growing generation gap. The energies of youth must be harnessed more
effectively and the chances of doing so are greater if the focus of economic
development is on something that interests them, like popular culture. - The religious revival in Africa, both Christian and Muslim, is a matter of
immense significance for the forms of economic development. This is in
many cases founded on young people’s rejection of the social models and
political options offered by their parents’ generation. Fundamentalist and
less extreme varieties of religion make a different kind of connection to
world society than that offered by the nation-state, based on the
assumption of American dominance or its opposite. They help to fill the
moral void of contemporary politics and often offer well-tried recipes for
creative economic organization (e.g. the Mourides of Senegal, see below).
Christian churches are usually organized and supported by women, even if
their leadership is often male. - In all the talk of poverty, war and AIDS, the western media rarely report
the extraordinary vitality of the modern arts in post-colonial Africa: novels,
films, music, theatre, painting, sculpture, dance and their applications in
commercial design. There has been an artistic explosion in the
last half century, drawing on traditional sources, but also responding to the
complexity of the contemporary world. One recent example is the ‘Africa
Remix’ exhibition that toured Europe and Japan, a hundred installations
from Johannesburg to Cairo, showing the modernity of contemporary
African art. The African novel, along with comparable regions like India,
leads the world. I have already referred to the creativity of the film industry. - Africa largely missed the first two phases of the machine revolution,
based on the steam engine and electricity; but the third phase, the digital
revolution in communications whose most tangible product is the internet,
the network of networks, offers Africans very different conditions of
participation that they already show signs of taking up avidly. In origin a
means of communication for scientists and the military, the internet is now
primarily a global marketplace with very unusual characteristics. Like the
informal economy, it goes largely unregulated; but this market freedom is
harnessed to the most advanced technologies of our era. The internet has
also generated new conditions for managing networks spanning home and
abroad by radically shortening the time and space dimensions of
communication and exchange at distance. The extraordinarily rapid
adoption of mobile phones has made Africa a crucible for global
innovations, such as the first multi-country network and use of phones for
banking purposes in East Africa. Nor should we neglect the role of
television as a transnational means of widening perceptions of community. - In the last half-century a new African diaspora has emerged, based unlike
that formed by Atlantic slavery on economic migration to America, Europe
and nowadays Asia. These migrants are usually known away from home by
their national identity, but many of them by-pass the national level when
maintaining close relationships with their specific region of origin. They are
often highly educated, with experience of the corporate business world,
while retaining links to relatives living and working in the informal economy
at home. One consequence of neo-liberal reforms has been that
transnational exchange is now much easier than it was, drawing at once on
indigenous knowledge of local conditions and the expertise acquired by
migrants and their families in the West. Remittances from abroad are of
immense importance everywhere, but they are bound to play a major role
in Africa’s economic future.
