Africa and Europe at the Crossroads
Early modern historical precedents. A Pan-African liberal revolution?
The precedent of the early modern liberal revolutions
Every person of African descent suffers from being stigmatized by color in a racist world. The United States and South Africa stand out for their oppression of black people, whether under slavery, colonialism or apartheid. But many Africans do not share this extreme history. West Africa suffered from the Atlantic slave trade for centuries, but never suffered white settlers or mining on a large scale, and colonialism there was for only a short period in the last century. Europe’s “Old Regimes” were overthrown by liberal revolutions. Political freedom lay in escaping from the arbitrary power and privilege of hereditary elites. Africans, despite numerous revolutions, have not found political forms that guarantee their equal participation in world society. Africa is young and growing fast, whereas Europe is old and shows it. A happy outcome for Africa is not inevitable; but a more hopeful gloss on development discourse is possible there.
Revolutions in the United States, France, Italy and Germany in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries combined mass insurgency with long periods of warfare. They built up the home market, and consolidated sovereignty by removing unfair taxes and restrictions on the movement of people, goods and money, usually against the rising global power of the British empire or lesser empires like Austria’s.
The global “free trade” regimes promoted by the British in the nineteenth century and US hegemony since 1945 obscured how freedom and protection are not alternatives, but a dynamic pair in all economies whose internal and external features are contradictory. American and German thinkers later linked national economics to political revolution. Impediments to trade—because of divided sovereignty within and between states—had to be overcome. National exchange between urban and rural areas needed protection from global predators.
In 1793, the Bretons raised a “Royal and Catholic Army” against the French Revolution. The Republic required an army to fight*, the subject of Victor Hugo’s last novel, Ninety-three. Nantes, France’s largest port grew rich on slavery and trade with the Caribbean. Their shippers financed the Republican army, and Nantes was besieged by the Royalist army. Four thousand Catholics and “royalists” drowned in the Loire (“the national bathtub”), and atrocities were commonplace, especially by the Republicans. This struggle to the death was the turning point in the revolution.
Why did the Nantes merchants risk so much for it? France, although a centralized monarchy, was still a patchwork of local fief-holders who exacted what they could from people and goods moving through their territory. The Republic promised to establish a consolidated, regulated and policed home market. The Nantes shippers wanted to reduce the costs of moving trade goods inland; and they allied with the revolution.
In the United States, American smugglers and Dutch traders led resistance to the East India Company’s tea monopoly and to British taxes imposed to offset the crown’s military costs; hence the “Boston Tea Party”. The Italian Risorgimento, led by Garibaldi, was backed by Milan and Turin’s industrialists. They wanted a unified home market and free access to world trade. In all cases, merchant and manufacturing capital played a decisive role in the revolution.
The Prussians launched a customs union in 1834; this was the first time that independent states formed a full without simultaneously creating political federation; the German Empire was founded in 1871.The European Common Market was form/%ed in 1957, the European Union in 1993. Germans attributed their underdevelopment to extreme political fragmentation (40 states in 1815). Prussia’s main aim was to expand a protected zone of free trade excluding the Austrians. The customs union was an attempt to harmonize tariffs, measures, regulations, and economic policy in a few scattered territories controlled by the Prussian ruling family. Most of Germany joined in a few decades. An expanded trade area protected from the world market would promote innovation.
These liberal revolutions aspired to freedom of movement within a consolidated territory and the removal of unfair taxes and restrictions on trade. Their principles of market, democracy and science have been distorted since then. The British and American Empires outlawed protection worldwide; but fragmented regions aspiring to national sovereignty have always espoused a more limited version based on cheaper labour and a unified home market. These examples of piecemeal development are relevant to any Pan-African revolution. Separate regional liberal revolutions are more promising than declarations on paper signed in Ethiopia’s capital by corrupt heads of African states.
A Pan-African liberal revolution?
Africa’s advantage is its weak attachment to the status quo. A recent poll reported that Africa has more hopeful people (30%) than anywhere else. The New York Times could not understand this, since Africa is the most hopeless place on earth! The world market for services is booming, and greater opportunities can be found there. Take, for example, the global success of popular culture from Japan and the South Korea—pop music, movies, online games, anime and manga comics. The world’s second largest film producer is in Lagos, Nigeria. Most of their films cost under $5,000, like Hollywood when W.G. Griffith was king. There is a Sunday market in Manhattan’s East Side, several blocks devoted to Nollywood CDs. Mexico City’s huge underground market at Tepito has an unregulated section with bootleg CDs and duplicated covers for only a few pesos.
The human economy’s future lies in the scope for people doing things for each other—singing songs, telling stories or playing games. The central conflict in capitalism today is between privatization of the cultural commons and popular resistance. Transnational corporations and their governments oppose any move into these markets. The terrain is not as rigidly mapped out as in agriculture and manufactures. Thanks to the Atlantic slave trade, Africans are well-placed to compete in the West, given the proven preference of global audiences for their music, plastic arts and movies.
Why is Hollywood where it is? The US film industry was in New Jersey struggling under Thomas Edison’s electronic patents; some escaped to the Far West and relaunched it there with minimal regulation. For his first Mickey Mouse cartoon, “Steamboat Willie”, Walt Disney ripped off a Buster Keaton movie without acknowledgment. Now the Disney Corporation sues Chinese cartoonists for stealing the Mickey Mouse logo. American popular culture is that country’s most successful export—music, movies and software. It could be the same for Africans.
What popular forces might sustain liberal revolution in Africa? Older men have dominated African societies, traditional and modern. Women are less tied to their burdens. Female traders have exploited the commercial freedoms of the current world economy. When men and boys plunged whole countries into civil war, women’s informal trade kept open basic supply lines. Africa’s cities are full of young people without enough work. The energies of youth would be harnessed by development that interests them, like popular culture.
The religious revival in Africa, Christian and Muslim, is crucial for economic development. Many young people reject their parents’ social models and political options. Fundamentalist religions offer a different connection to world society than nation-states and village societies. They fill the moral void of contemporary politics and offer encouragement for creative economic organization. Christian churches are usually organized and supported by women, even if their leadership is male.
Western media focus on Africa’s hardships more than the extraordinary vitality of its modern arts: novels, films, music, theater, painting, sculpture, dance and their applications in commercial design. There has been an artistic explosion drawing on traditional sources, but also responding to the complexity of our world. An “Africa Remix” exhibition showing off contemporary African art toured Europe and Japan with a hundred installations by artists from Johannesburg to Cairo, many combining residence at home with sojourns in the North.
Africa missed the first two phases of the machine revolution based on the steam engine and electricity; but they are now adopting the third digital phase avidly. The internet is now a global marketplace with very unusual characteristics. Like the informal economy, it goes largely unregulated; and this is harnessed to the most advanced technologies. By shortening the time and space of communications, the internet and phone networks span home and abroad. Smart phones have made East Africa a crucible for mobile money, now diffusing throughout the continent. Television too is a transnational means of broadening perceptions of community.
A postwar African diaspora of economic migrants has emerged in North America, Europe and Asia. Direct links with home are often with their region of origin rather than with the nation-state. There is no model of successful enterprise, just many stories of economic innovation. The Mourides, a Sufist order founded a century ago, constitutes an informal state with Senegal. Their trading operations influence national economies, as when they moved shoe supplies to the US (via Harlem) from Italy to China. A network of North African Muslims has long run cars and car parts illegally from Europe to Africa through Marseilles, leading the French car industry to move production South to meet the demand.
Nollywood offers morality plays to African audiences at an affordable price, while its home city, Lagos is a mess. In seventeenth-century London, when England’s political, commercial and scientific revolutions were roaring ahead, herds of wild pigs savaged unwary pedestrians to death. and the water supply was undrinkable—leading writers like Samuel Pepys were usually drunk by 10 am.
African cities growth should have led to cumulative exchange, as rural areas, minus migrants to the cities, supply food to city-dwellers and buy the latter’s manufactures and services. But this requires protection from the big beasts in the world market, forbidden by globalization. Urbanization has spawned weak and venal states, dependent on foreign powers and leaving the rural and urban masses to their own devices. African development must build on the urban revolution of the last century. It did not support a progressive political economy, but it did boost population growth now. This could support genuine progress. But it won’t, if political leaders depend on minerals, agriculture, and manufactures, and do not understand the digital services economy.
After independence, national elites first relied on revenues from agricultural exports, then on dubious loans, finally on the monopoly of supervising financial relations with global capitalism. But capital found it could dispense with national intermediaries and concentrated on collecting debts instead. Hope for African democracy was replaced by dictatorship, civil or military.
The key to Africa’s economic growth is the production of its cities. African countries have relied on exporting raw materials. Minerals have a promising future owing to scarce supplies and escalating demand for the means of digital communications. The world market for food is skewed by Western dumping. African governments have embraced manufacturing as an alternative, but they face intense competition from Asia. The world market for digital services is booming and greater opportunities exist there.
Services were performed personally on the spot; but today they link producers and consumers at distance. The fastest-growing sector of world trade is culture: entertainment, education, sports, media, software and information services. The largest global television audiences are for sporting events such as the football World Cup or the Olympic Games.
The world’s largest music company, Universal, is currently betting on Afro-beat and recently opened a branch in Lagos. American popular culture is still that country’s most successful export—especially of music, and software. Africans’ median age is already under 20. Consider what Rap has done for young African Americans or West African high life—forged in Brazil, Cuba and New Orleans—for the first independence generation 70 years ago and after.
Africans tend to attribute their own failings to slavery, colonialism, apartheid, and neocolonialism and focus on demands for reparation. These alone are not responsible for the continent’s dire situation today. Africans now pioneer mobile money, notably Kenya’s M-Pesa. They embrace the digital economy enabled by small, powerful and cheap personal machines (smart phones) with great energy and imagination. Learning from earlier commercial revolutions elsewhere, while using contemporary technology, could generate fresh solutions to Africa’s challenges.
This will require broad-based social revolutions. These could be fed by the energy of youth and women; the religious revival; exploding modern arts; the digital revolution; and a returning African global Diaspora since 1945. These revolutions will be shaped by Africa’s own history. But liberal revolutions in Bolivar’s Latin America and Southeast Asia more recently provide lessons too.
Africa is held back by the labyrinthine confusion of regional associations that do not strengthen bargaining power in world trade or the main international forums. Yet African peoples, despite their rulers’ ineffectual attempts to force economy and society into national cages, still maintain patterns of long-distance movement and exchange developed over centuries. This is why African economies are “informal”: state regulations are ignored; half the people and most economic activities are criminalized; an absurd public effort tries to apply unenforceable rules. Classical liberalism offers an answer: build the widest possible area of protected free trade and movement, with minimal and harmonized regulation by the authorities. Neoliberal policies have discredited this strategy, since such political initiatives obstruct the unfettered flow of global capital.
National development never made sense in Africa and less today. Africans could overcome the obstacles to progress, but not by sticking with nation-states imposed by departing colonial empires. Asian manufacturing exporters know that African demand will provide a buoyant market for their exports; the West wallows in nostalgia for its past glories. Africans should stand up for themselves (Hart and Padayachee 2010, Hart 2013). While relying on mass popular support, successful revolutions need allies with significant wealth and power.
Africans must develop their own transnational associations to combat those who would deny them self-development. Proposals for integration of trade and finance have taken place at the level of the African Union. But this means relying on the political class that has failed Africans. Civil society movements are excluded from their deliberations. The classical liberal strategy is inescapable and historically well-tested: the boundaries of free commerce and of political intervention should be pushed beyond the limits of existing national sovereignty.
Shipping has reduced transport costs for material objects as radically as the digital revolution has for information. A car made in Shanghai costs roughly $5,000 to make and ship to Dar-es-Salaam. It costs another $4,000 to transport overland to Kampala, 1,500 kilometers away. Police and soldiers extract tribute at every point, while holding up all travelers, however poor.
In 2100, half the world’s children 18 and under will be African. What will those young urban Africans do, if their sheer numbers can beat the corrupt old men who rule them now? Western societies are stuck in the world they made long ago; they are growing older and resent the younger non-whites who work for their pensions. My generation once believed that the West was decadent; we found hope in the postcolonial insurgents. South Africa came late to that struggle with considerable advantages; it is now a basket case. The country celebrates itself as exceptional, without any of the United States’ historical justification. For years, its civil society won global support when fighting racism. Nelson Mandela was the world’s most admired politician; but his idea of a “rainbow nation” was tied to national capitalism in its death throes. South Africa’s estrangement from the rest of Africa only amplifies its domestic ruin. To save their own skins, the African National Congress government drags their citizens into the Third World War’s losing side. But South Africa shares something else with the United States—geographical isolation between two oceans where continents start and end.
When I moved from Cambridge to Paris 25 years ago, I made a second home in Durban. My friend, writing partner and guide there, Vishnu Padayachee, was not mainly a good economist. He believed in civil society, not political parties; was a historian with an internationalist vision; and built alternative social and economic institutions all his adult life. He taught Durban workers economics in night classes. The African National Congress—then in exile while playing a very minor role in defeating apartheid on home territory—had him marked down as a potential troublemaker. At a York conference, he was collared by an ANC Stalinist thug, later a minister in Mandela’s government (one of six Indians): “Are you a Trotskyite or something? What are you teaching economics to the workers for? The Party knows what’s best for them!” Vishnu made a quick exit.
Without our conversation and writing partnership—Vishnu was also a huge fan of my mentor, C.L.R. James—I would not have found my mature intellectual politics or renewed the hope I once cherished for Africa’s future. Former radicals throughout Africa—and committed progressives from anywhere—should take courage from their former democratic revival. They should share their experience with the African kids who, like Generation Z everywhere, know they have been dealt a terrible hand. They might save the world, but they cannot do it alone.
Humanity is entering a new era of social possibility. The current shift from West to East does not guarantee that Africans will soon cast off the stigma of racial inferiority; but North Atlantic dominance is perceptibly shifting; and change is easier to envisage now. Africans’ drive for emancipation from internal and externally imposed inequality affects us all. Revolution in Africa would be a world revolution. The new human universal is not an idea, but an urgent need for humanity to discover need principles association for living together on this planet