Not in the slightest, writes Charles Kenny in FP.
It’s true that some countries in the region are as poor as England under William the Conqueror, but that doesn’t mean Africa’s on the verge of doomsday. How many serfs had a cellphone? More than 63 million Nigerians do. Millions travel on buses and trucks across the continent each year, even if the average African road is still fairly bumpy.
The list of modern technologies now ubiquitous in the region also includes cement, corrugated iron, steel wire, piping, plastic sheeting and containers, synthetic and cheap cotton clothing, rubber-soled shoes, bicycles, butane, paraffin candles, pens, paper, books, radios, televisions, vaccines, antibiotics, and bed nets.
The spread of these technologies has helped expand economies, improve quality of life, and extend health. About 10 percent of infants die in their first year of life in Africa — still shockingly high, but considerably lower than the European average less than 100 years ago, let alone 800 years past. And about two thirds of Africans are literate — a level achieved in Spain only in the 1920s.
Kenny’s point: let’s not undersell progress in Africa just because it has yet to show up in GDP. On other measures of development there has been unprecedented advance.
I’d add that, in spite of the nasty and brutal politics present in some corners of the continent, Africans exercise more voice in their own affairs than ever before, especially women and youth.
The literacy figure I find hard to buy, though. Are we sure this isn’t two-thirds of the Africans we have data on? Not a representative sample. If by literate we mean able to read a newspaper, I think we have a long way to two thirds.
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Hans Rosling said very similar things about developing countries in general, and Africa in particular in his talk this June at the US State Department. He also added that the HIV epidemic, is no epidemic at all, and that we need to pay much better attention to the data (http://newschooljournal.com/2009/08/hans-roslings-back/). He repeated a nice comparison from a few years back that on its own merit Africa, as a whole, has made leaps and bounds in the last 50 years compared to Europe or Latin America, which he talked about at the TED conferences in 2007 and 2008 (http://newschooljournal.com/2009/02/can-you-see-the-music/). The data he has is quite excellent, and its data available to all of us, it’s just the way he visualizes it…
Kenny also uses these points to point out the uselessness of GDP as a development indicator. That’s not quite fair either–many all of the advances mentioned derive from the fact that world GDP, if not country GDP, is high.
All the criteria to indicate ‘medievalness’ put forth here are quite curious if not misleading imho. Surely the main characteristic that distinguishes medieval ages from ‘modernity’ is the state and organisation of society, especially since this arguably is what drives development in the first place. Medieval society was characterised by feudalism, serfdom (i.e. extra-economic coercion), barred spatial and social mobility, class based access/barriers to education, and accumulation based on political power rather than economic competition and subsequent productive efficiency, and the consequent economic stagnation. The change that came with modernity was an end to feudalism and serfdom, the rise of free (wage) labourers and capitalism, therewith free competition and the subsequent explosive growth expierience since then.
So the question here must be answered by assessing whether African societies are still characterised by ‘pre-capitalised’ forms of production (serfdom, subsistence farming, etc). This is much more interesting and certainly much less trivial to answer than just looking at access to (imported) modern technology and other welfare achievements (which, after all, in Europe came AFTER the advent of capitalism and modernity, not the other way round).
Personally, I do think that most African societies are actually modern and capitalist, however this modernity is still not necessarily dominant as it is mixed with other modes of production. Furthermore, the capitalist aspects of especially rural Africa can be rather hidden because the ostensible part of the economy still centres on the farm, although many forms of wage labour and monetary economy are existant and important (especially to the poor).