Comments on: Are conditions in Africa medieval?

By: Benjamin

Benjamin — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 10:00:53 +0000

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…

By: Thorfinn

Thorfinn — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 20:58:49 +0000

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.

By: Eddie

Eddie — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 19:43:47 +0000

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).