A History of Western Ignorance: Why We Need to Think Differently About African Economics - Africonomics with Bronwen Everill

[00:00:00] You're listening to the Unlocking Africa Podcast.

[00:00:30] They perceive the problem to be in Africa.

[00:00:32] What do these observations about how Africa's economies really work reflect back onto these Western economies?

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[00:00:47] You're listening to the Unlocking Africa Podcast with your host, Terser Adamu.

[00:00:55] Welcome to the Unlocking Africa Podcast where we find inspirational people who are doing inspirational things to unlock Africa's economic potential.

[00:01:05] Today we have Bronwen Everill, a fellow of Gonville and Keyes College and was the director of Cambridge University's Centre for African Studies.

[00:01:15] Recently joined the faculty of the Princeton Writing Program and a visiting fellow at the Laboratory for the Economics of Africa's past in the Department of Economics at Sterling Bosch University.

[00:01:30] Welcome, welcome, welcome to the podcast Bronwen. How are you?

[00:01:34] Bronwen Everill Very good. Thank you so much for having me.

[00:01:37] How was that introduction?

[00:01:38] Bronwen Everill Yeah, that's fine.

[00:01:41] Brilliant, brilliant.

[00:01:42] Thank you for joining us on the podcast.

[00:01:44] I know it's something that we've been discussing for quite a while to get you on to talk about this fantastic book that you have published, which is Africanomics, a history of Western ignorance.

[00:01:57] Bronwen Everill I guess the book also highlights the West's lack of understanding of African economics, which is a very interesting position and I guess topic to discuss.

[00:02:12] But before we get into the conversation, I was hoping you could give us an introduction just to tell us a bit more about yourself.

[00:02:21] Bronwen Everill Yeah, sure.

[00:02:22] Bronwen Everill Sure.

[00:02:22] Bronwen Everill Sure.

[00:02:22] Bronwen Everill So I am from the US originally, and I had been teaching in the UK for the past 15 years.

[00:02:30] Bronwen Everill So I've only just moved back to join the Princeton Writing Faculty.

[00:02:34] Bronwen Everill As you said, was directing the Center of African Studies at Cambridge for a while.

[00:02:39] Bronwen Everill And at Cambridge, I co-ran the African Economic History seminar, the research seminar, where we would bring in people working on these topics from around the world.

[00:02:50] Bronwen Everill And I co-ran that with Gareth Austin.

[00:02:53] Bronwen Everill And for a while it was the only dedicated African economic history research seminar in the world.

[00:03:00] Bronwen Everill Oh wow.

[00:03:01] Bronwen Everill We had people coming from all over the continent, as well as from Europe and the US, people working on these topics.

[00:03:09] Bronwen Everill And so the book is based on my own research, but it is also an attempt to sort of feature some of the research that people brought to the seminar.

[00:03:19] Bronwen Everill So to sort of think about how all of that research that we saw coming through our research seminar over those eight or so years, how that can sort of help illuminate these bigger questions in imperial history and economic history and these global questions about how economic development has happened over the past 200 years.

[00:03:45] Bronwen Everill And so the book really features a lot of the work that people are doing in those sort of more grounded local stories.

[00:03:55] Bronwen Everill So it is my research, but it's also an attempt to feature all of these other researchers from the continent and beyond.

[00:04:03] Bronwen Everill As you mentioned, you're originally from the US, lived in the UK.

[00:04:08] Bronwen Everill So I was wondering how did this interest in African economics begin?

[00:04:15] Bronwen Everill Yeah.

[00:04:15] Bronwen Everill I mean, I think there's like a couple of converging paths, right?

[00:04:20] Bronwen Everill I think in one of the chapters of the later chapters, I sort of get into a little bit of like my own history with the sort of humanitarian ideas that were really prevalent in the 90s in the US and in the UK.

[00:04:35] Bronwen Everill These sort of ideas that, you know, Africa was this benighted continent that needed all kinds of forms of rescue.

[00:04:41] Bronwen Everill So, you know, I worked in a fair trade shop and I, you know, had one of these, one of these armbands in the sort of saved our four era, right?

[00:04:51] Bronwen Everill So I think that there was, that was always like, you know, in the back of my mind.

[00:04:55] Bronwen Everill And as I became a historian of African economic history, I sort of realized how much I was part of the problem, you know, in that era.

[00:05:06] Bronwen Everill And so from the research side of it, my PhD was on Sierra Leone and Liberia in the 19th century.

[00:05:15] So how they were established as anti-slavery colonies, what it means to be an anti-slavery colony, right?

[00:05:22] Like anti-slavery good, colony bad, right?

[00:05:24] So we're like, what is the sort of, what are the internal contradictions that happen when Britain and the U.S. start thinking about Africa as a place to not only have this sort of slave trading relationship, right?

[00:05:38] Which they had had in the, you know, 17th, 18th century.

[00:05:41] But in the 19th century, trying to sort of transform that relationship into something new while not giving up the kind of exploitative power that they have in that relationship.

[00:05:51] So that's the kind of driving research question.

[00:05:55] Like what kind of power does a humanitarian perspective give the person who holds the humanitarian perspective?

[00:06:02] What is the sort of power that pity gives the pittier, right?

[00:06:09] And that has been present through a lot of my research questions.

[00:06:12] And then I was really wanting to focus in on the economic side of that for this book.

[00:06:18] So I guess a lot of these misconceptions or perceptions, one drives the other.

[00:06:24] But I was hoping you could probably elaborate on, I guess, from your perspective, how do some of these historical misconceptions about African wealth influence the Western interventions that we do see?

[00:06:38] What the book sort of sets out to do is that each chapter looks at a particular person arriving on the continent and thinking that they perceive a problem that they can fix with their, you know, advanced Western knowledge or whatever.

[00:06:53] And so it starts in the late 18th century.

[00:06:56] And then each chapter sort of moves us a little bit forwards and it ends pretty contemporarily.

[00:07:01] So the sort of pattern that I found in teaching the subject and in doing the research on it was that basically somebody would come and put in some new plan, some new intervention to fix what they thought the problems were.

[00:07:17] And then, you know, a couple of decades later, a new person would arrive and see the sort of outcome of that original intervention and say, oh, you know, there's this problem with Africa's economies and I'm going to implement this thing.

[00:07:33] Right.

[00:07:34] So, you know, it's kind of like they don't see that there are going to be any kind of externalities to the kinds of interventions that they make.

[00:07:45] Right.

[00:07:45] They think that there's like going to be one quick fix to any of these problems and that they are going to be the one to implement it.

[00:07:51] And then, of course, there are like consequences to that.

[00:07:56] And, you know, these interventions end up reshaping things and then the next generation comes and then they are like already in a position of thinking that, you know, Africa's economies are problematic.

[00:08:07] So we need to come and intervene.

[00:08:09] And so then they like, you know, either undo all the things that the previous generation did or they bring in new plans that then, you know, mess it up again.

[00:08:17] And so it's just a pattern over and over again of whatever happens to be the sort of trendy, faddish way of thinking about the economy in Britain, in the U.S., in France, wherever, in a particular decade ends up being seen as like, of course, that's the solution to, you know, whatever they perceive the problem to be in Africa.

[00:08:38] So this happens over and over again.

[00:08:40] So the book sort of comes back to several themes.

[00:08:43] One is this idea of like wealth and people versus wealth and land, right?

[00:08:48] So in Europe, land is very scarce and expensive and there are a lot of people.

[00:08:53] So labor is fairly cheap in the, you know, in the 19th century.

[00:08:57] In Africa, that sort of calculus is completely switched, right?

[00:09:01] There is actually quite an abundant amount of land and labor is scarce.

[00:09:07] And so land theoretically ought to be the thing that's cheap.

[00:09:11] And labor is the thing that's expensive.

[00:09:16] But because in Europe, it's the other way around, a lot of the solutions that they come up with for what they perceive to be Africa's problems.

[00:09:26] So things like a lot of land that isn't being used for farming, for instance.

[00:09:32] They see that and they're like, oh, well, they just don't know how to farm or, you know, oh, they're just not very efficient at farming.

[00:09:39] When in fact, it's just that like it's really it doesn't they don't need to because actually there's like, you know, abundant land.

[00:09:46] Lots of it can lay fallow.

[00:09:47] So, you know, and then they look at how much laborers are asking to work, how much they're asking in wages.

[00:09:55] And they're like, oh, they're so lazy because they don't want to work for these cheap, cheap wages that we want to give them.

[00:10:00] They have to be like taught how to be proper laborers.

[00:10:03] Well, of course, they don't want to work for those cheap, cheap wages.

[00:10:06] They know that they're in high demand.

[00:10:08] Right. That's not the case like it is in England, where actually there's just an abundance of laborers.

[00:10:12] And if you want any work at all, you're going to have to accept a cheap wage.

[00:10:16] Right. So instead of seeing the economy as an economy, they arrive with this idea that, you know, the economy ought to be the same as it is in Europe.

[00:10:25] And therefore, the fact that it isn't is some kind of moral failure of the Africans that they're encountering.

[00:10:31] And that, you know, that actually what they need is education in the right way to be economic people rather than that.

[00:10:38] You know, actually, the economy in Europe is one thing.

[00:10:42] The economy in Africa is another thing. Right.

[00:10:44] And it's not that like one of them has the right universal laws and the other one doesn't.

[00:10:48] It's that like the laws of the economy in Europe are just different.

[00:10:52] The laws of the economy in Africa are just different.

[00:10:54] And neither of them is, you know, is actually the universal.

[00:10:59] Fantastic. So, I mean, I'd like to take it back from the beginning.

[00:11:03] As you mentioned, the book starts in the 18th century, touching on the slave trade.

[00:11:08] So if we start from here, looking at the book, how do you tackle this very, I guess, sensitive topic in terms of how the abolition of the slave trade shaped subsequent economic interventions in Africa?

[00:11:27] Yeah. So I think I start from the premise that the slave trade was important for economic development.

[00:11:36] Right. So taking Eric Williams at face value and saying, yes, the slave trade contributed to economic growth in Europe.

[00:11:45] It contributed to economic growth in the Americas.

[00:11:47] It contributed in a certain sense to a kind of economic growth in West Africa where the slave trade was coming from.

[00:11:56] Right. So in all of those places, certain kinds of governments really benefited from the slave trade.

[00:12:04] Certain influential merchants really benefited from the slave trade.

[00:12:08] In all of those places, slavery was terrible for the people who were enslaved.

[00:12:13] And in all of those places, there were lots of other people who were also negatively economically impacted by the slave trade.

[00:12:20] But for the states that were involved and for the individual companies or individuals who were invested in it, it was, you know, it was enriching in lots of ways.

[00:12:33] Right. So so taking the sort of starting point of by the end of the 18th century, the slave trade was a functioning economic system in the same way that I guess you could say like the drugs, the illegal drugs trade is a functioning economic system.

[00:12:53] Right. Like lots of there are people who benefit from it a lot.

[00:12:56] Right. And it has rules and it probably functions pretty efficiently at this point because it's been going on for a long time.

[00:13:04] Right. So like this is a system that exists and it works for some people.

[00:13:09] When it's abolished, the people who are involved with slavery in places like Britain, in France, they are compensated by the governments.

[00:13:24] And by the governments, I mean by the taxpayers of those countries. Right.

[00:13:29] So the abolition of the slave trade and of slavery is sort of mitigated for those economies. Right.

[00:13:37] Internally, when the abolitionists arrive in Africa, there is a little bit of an attempt to do some mitigation.

[00:13:49] Right. So they try to introduce something called legitimate commerce, which is basically looking for any other product.

[00:13:56] That they can find that could be in the same sort of amount of demand as enslaved people were and therefore like not disrupt the economies too much.

[00:14:07] Inevitably, trying to switch away, you know, making one kind of trade illegal and switching away to another takes time.

[00:14:14] And not every place that had been good at exporting enslaved people turns out to be good at exporting other kinds of commodities.

[00:14:24] So there are economic impacts. Right.

[00:14:28] So there's that side of it.

[00:14:30] But there's also the side that as slavery is abolished gradually on the continent over the 19th century, there is not compensation.

[00:14:37] Right. For that. And so ultimately, across the 19th century, the governments in Europe who claim, you know, that they're like intervening in Africa's economies because the slave trade has made them backwards.

[00:14:52] Don't apply the same laws of that intervention on the continent that they do at home.

[00:14:59] Right. They give money to the people affected at home.

[00:15:03] They do not give money to the people affected in Africa.

[00:15:06] And partially that is because it all sort of builds into a narrative of seeing Africa as a place where there are victims and there are perpetrators.

[00:15:19] And the role of Europeans is to protect African victims from African perpetrators.

[00:15:26] And that becomes an important story that Europeans tell themselves about what they're doing when they are doing imperialism on the continent.

[00:15:36] Interesting. So if we move from the slave trade, obviously we've touched on the abolition and then I guess follows the whole colonial era.

[00:15:46] From the book, how are the legacies of the colonial economic interventions still visible in African economies today?

[00:15:58] Yeah, I mean, I think there are a number of different threads that pull through there.

[00:16:04] I think one of the things that's hard to do in thinking about colonialism and colonialism's legacies is colonialism is a system of governance that arrives with capitalism, that arrives with like, you know, urbanization, that arrives with industrialization, that arrives with an attempt to sort of globalize and integrate commodity markets.

[00:16:27] And so picking apart, you know, which things are a result of global capitalism and which things are a result of colonialism is really hard.

[00:16:39] I think it's, you know, it's a little bit easier, I guess, to say that one of, you know, that the legacies of that period can be seen.

[00:16:48] But it's hard to necessarily like point to specific things that are, you know, colonial versus capitalist.

[00:16:54] But I would say like the overwhelming legacy in the long term is the like big shift away from the land abundance labor scarcity model.

[00:17:07] Right. So like if that's the predominant way to think about the sort of different kinds of approaches that existed in the pre-colonial era, by the end of the colonial era, those have shifted quite significantly.

[00:17:23] And so you do start to get labor abundance, you know, in the late 20th century as a result of that.

[00:17:29] So that's one real big shift, I would say.

[00:17:32] Yeah. I guess if we move from that to obviously the current times and look at, as you said, it's hard to pinpoint specifically what stemmed from colonialism, but we still see certain issues or factors play within the economies.

[00:17:51] But what would you say are some of the most persistent myths which are probably tied to those legacies?

[00:17:57] Yeah, I think that idea that that there are like, you know, two kinds of two kinds of Africans.

[00:18:06] There are like, you know, the the victims and the perpetrators is a really persistent one. Right.

[00:18:11] So so that a lot of the time, I think a lot of the time, the kinds of success in business or success in like, you know, I guess capitalism or whatever, it tends to be read with that sort of lens.

[00:18:31] So, for instance, if you get somebody like, you know, a Dan Goatee, for instance, who's, you know, I'm sure totally not unproblematic, but is wildly successful.

[00:18:49] Right. As a business person. The kind of read that you get on that is with this eye to, well, we know that there are, you know, Africans on the continent who exploit other Africans.

[00:19:01] And so should we celebrate his success or should we be very skeptical of his success?

[00:19:07] And I'm all for being skeptical of business people's success.

[00:19:12] That's totally fine.

[00:19:14] But I think that it gets read in a way that a sort of similar kind of entrepreneurial success in someplace like the U.S. or in Britain would not get read.

[00:19:26] Right. Or similarly, if you think about the ways that government corruption is reported when it's reported about Africa.

[00:19:36] I mean, again, I'm sure that there is government corruption happening.

[00:19:39] A hundred percent. I'm not I'm not doubting that. But I also know that there's government corruption in a lot of Western countries.

[00:19:46] Right. And I think that the ways that it gets reported in when talking about in the Western media, when talking about Africa is as though as though it's expected, you know, like, oh, of course, of course, that's the way it is there.

[00:20:00] Right. But also as though it is the you know, it is Westerners, therefore, responsibility to do something about it on behalf of everybody else.

[00:20:09] Which is definitely, you know, not the approach that, for instance, the U.S. takes to the U.K.

[00:20:16] Right. And so a big part of the story that I'm trying to tell in the book is is the story of that power, the power to intervene economically in ways that, you know, the West doesn't do to itself.

[00:20:29] Right. If we suspect that there's economic corruption in, I don't know, Germany, we're not really going to do anything about it.

[00:20:39] We might talk to them, but we're not going to like stop trading with them.

[00:20:44] Whereas that is the case when we when the Western media talks about, you know, for instance, Zimbabwe or something.

[00:20:50] So totally I understand. So guys, going back to the point you made about success, I think you made a point in terms of how have Western metrics such as GDP skewed perceptions of African success or failure?

[00:21:07] Yeah. So this comes up in one of my chapters when I talk about Samir Amin, who is a Egyptian economist who starts to notice pretty quickly after independence in the, you know, in the late 60s and through the 70s,

[00:21:24] that these metrics that are crucial for newly independent countries to get the loans that they need or the, you know, the funding that they need to do the infrastructure projects that will, you know, help them to realize their development goals,

[00:21:38] that those metrics are really not fit for purpose.

[00:21:42] And so there's a actually there's a really wonderful book by somebody who has worked on this topic exclusively, Morton Dervin, which is called Poor Numbers.

[00:21:51] And and also Polly Hill is another economic anthropologist who's worked on this topic.

[00:21:56] But, you know, the chapter looks at all three of these people and thinks about, you know, the fact that, as Samir Amin points out,

[00:22:04] a lot of the kinds of economic activity that are happening in post-colonial Africa are, you know, internal. Right.

[00:22:13] So and there's like what what is, you know, commonly referred to as subsistence agriculture.

[00:22:19] Right. As part of like a big part of the mix.

[00:22:23] And there isn't really a way of counting that kind of economic activity when you're thinking about GDP and that the sort of statistics offices that are set up in these early post-colonial governments

[00:22:37] and then that are trying to sort of stagger through the structural adjustment period in the in the 1980s and stuff,

[00:22:45] that they just really don't have the capacity to, you know, collect the kind of data that goes into the production of GDP numbers in highly,

[00:22:58] you know, in places that have like, for instance, income tax like the U.S. or whatever. Right.

[00:23:04] And so those kinds of metrics are, you know, really patchy, but are somehow being like strung together and pasted together in these sort of ramshackle ways to try to present this picture of economic performance in order to get these loans and to show that,

[00:23:22] you know, the countries can pay them back.

[00:23:26] This isn't to say that those countries are, you know, not capable of paying them back, especially in the in the 1960s.

[00:23:33] They have, you know, sort of economic boom because there's so there's so much demand for the kinds of commodities that they're producing.

[00:23:41] But that, you know, that ultimately the kinds of measures that they're that are being imposed on them are just not in terms.

[00:23:49] You know, they're not measures that are fit for purpose because they're not homegrown measures. Right.

[00:23:54] So, like, you know, if a newly independent Ghana, for instance, wanted to get some loans, what I think a an internal accounting system would probably look very different from what was being imposed from outside.

[00:24:08] And that's sort of what Samir Amin is trying to to argue for.

[00:24:11] He's saying, you know, we need actually to think about, you know, educating ourselves in sort of like local understandings of the economy to sort of reframe the way that we're we're projecting our economic successes to the world.

[00:24:26] But unfortunately, you know, in the 70s and then into the 80s, the decline in the price of commodities means that the IMF does come in and sort of impose structural adjustment and, you know, doubles down on that kind of counting.

[00:24:42] Fantastic. So, guys, if we consider GDP, obviously as a Western metric, what are some of the examples of African economic thought that Western interventions have overlooked?

[00:25:00] Yeah. I think one of the things that the book is trying to argue is that this is a sort of two way problem. Right.

[00:25:07] So there's the the problem of Western imposition of what, you know, what Westerners think are these universal models and sort of just like trying to make Africa's economies fit their their preconceptions.

[00:25:21] But there's also a sort of doubling back there, which is what do these observations about how Africa's economies really work reflect back onto these Western economies? Right.

[00:25:33] So so thinking about, you know, that that sort of wealth and people idea like, you know, that that there is this misread of of what wealth and people are doing.

[00:25:44] So in that very first chapter, the protagonist is like observing that, you know, people are wearing sort of weird combinations of secondhand European clothes.

[00:25:55] They live in that houses. She thinks that that means they're poor, but she also observes that they have like the king has lots of wives. Right.

[00:26:03] And so she's sort of misunderstanding that, like, actually what's going on there is that he has this sort of this wealth and people and that he's just putting on the like the things that he knows Europeans read as wealth in terms of their clothes for a European audience.

[00:26:21] But the chapter then says, but like actually there's wealth in terms of people in, you know, in various situations in England in this period.

[00:26:31] You know, if you think about Jane Austen, there's all kinds of considerations about like how people display their wealth through the number of servants they have, for instance.

[00:26:43] So it's the problems that I identified with GDP actually have manifested themselves in Western economies in the past 10 years. Right.

[00:26:54] So, for instance, you know, a big problem in counting GDP in African countries for a long time was this problem of informal labor. Right.

[00:27:04] People who are not working in the formal labor market. It's hard to count their economic contribution. Right.

[00:27:09] And so so there's a sort of economic idea emerging around, you know, informal labor markets in Africa.

[00:27:18] But Western economists aren't really paying attention to that emerging discussion about informal labor markets and how to count them.

[00:27:25] And then you get the rise of the gig economy in the West. Right.

[00:27:30] And rather than looking to Africa for an example of how we could think about counting informal labor when thinking about how the economy is functioning, they try to make it from, you know, they try to like squeeze informal laborers into the existing model in the West.

[00:27:47] Right. Oh, like, well, let's just like try to like make this work here or let's try to come up with a wholly new way of thinking about the gig economy. Right.

[00:27:55] And so it's it's partially that the Western ideas don't fit the African model.

[00:28:01] But it's also that like the West seems to refuse to look to Africa as a model for themselves.

[00:28:08] It's like, oh, no, we couldn't we couldn't possibly learn anything from there.

[00:28:11] Like, you know, it's so different there that it's got to be there.

[00:28:15] But also we can make them more like us rather than being like, oh, actually, look, they have something that we actually now have.

[00:28:22] And maybe thinking about the way that they're doing it there is going to help us here.

[00:28:26] So the informal economy is one example of that.

[00:28:31] And yeah.

[00:28:32] And the way that people are sort of thinking about wealth and people, the way that people are thinking about gifts, the way that people think about moral economy more generally.

[00:28:40] Right. So like how to how to manage unequal economies, how to sort of regulate the accumulation of wealth by one or two individuals within a particular economy.

[00:28:54] And, you know, the West has one way of dealing with that.

[00:28:57] And I think regularly looks at at these places in Africa, you know, look looks at Uganda and is like, oh, no, like some people are becoming wealthy.

[00:29:07] We have to intervene because, you know, otherwise the they're going to take advantage of everybody else.

[00:29:13] And we have to, you know, be there to rescue African victims from African perpetrators.

[00:29:17] But in fact, you know, Rhiannon Stevens, one of the people who I talk about in the book, has done a whole lot of research on this existing moral economy that that has a system for, you know,

[00:29:29] making sure that nobody, nobody becomes, you know, outlandishly wealthy relative to everybody else.

[00:29:37] Right. So so maybe, you know, maybe we could look to those kinds of systems and think, like, are there other ways of regulating, regulating growing inequality in our own backyard?

[00:29:52] I mean, within the book, you argued that applying the universal economic laws to Africa is fundamentally flawed, which I guess also links into that notion in terms of, as you call it, Western economic experiments, even when well-meaning can cause harm.

[00:30:13] I was wondering if you can kind of go into a bit more detail regarding that.

[00:30:17] Yeah. So I think there's like a example in one of the chapters about this anti-slavery guy called Thomas Fowle Buxton,

[00:30:29] who really wants desperately to end slavery in Africa and the slave trade from Africa in the in the like 1830s and 1840s.

[00:30:39] He writes a couple of books. He writes a couple of books. He writes a couple of books. He gets the British government to like give a bunch of money to send a mission up the Niger River to set up a model farm to help teach people around the Niger how to farm.

[00:30:59] Buxton has no experience in farming. He's a businessman in London. He works in the brewery industry.

[00:31:07] But he thinks farming is like good, wholesome activity, you know, and that people who farm are like good, wholesome kinds of people.

[00:31:17] And that this would, you know, break the, you know, if people were self-sufficient farmers in Africa, then they wouldn't rely on the proceeds from the slave trade.

[00:31:27] And so like, you know, they could get off of the slave trade reliance there.

[00:31:34] And the chapter outlines what happens in that mission. I don't want to give you a spoiler there.

[00:31:39] But I think, I think what is, what is really hilarious to me is that at like exactly the same time, the leader of what is now referred to as the Sokojo Caliphate, but, you know, is basically the sort of largest state in, in this region, which is like, you know, in Northern Nigeria, but also spreads from Chad to, to sort of Burkina Faso kind of area.

[00:32:07] Big state of all these sort of Emirates. And the leader of that has, you know, has set up cotton planting in this region.

[00:32:17] So when the, the model farm people arrive there with their, with their cotton plant plants that fail, they actually have to go to one of these Emirates and ask for cotton plants.

[00:32:33] Right. So they're like, they're going there to show people how to farm. And in the end, they have to go to the people to be like, actually your cotton plants are, are thriving.

[00:32:45] Can you show us how to farm? Right.

[00:32:46] Right. So, you know, on, on the one hand, you know, comedy of errors in that they're like really well intentioned. They really have good motives at heart. They want to, you know, they want to end slavery. That's like, you know, I think we can all get behind that as a motive, but they're just, they're so full of ignorance, you know, that they just can't do it.

[00:33:05] And, you know, that would be, it would be sort of just a like, sort of sad comedy of errors for them. But, but there is a, like, that power dynamic ends up coming into play. Right.

[00:33:17] So that desperation to abolish the slave trade to like, you know, that that is their moral purpose in West Africa just keeps building and building.

[00:33:28] And there are more and more interventions in this re in this part of Nigeria until they destroy the Sokoto Caliphate. Right.

[00:33:35] On the premise that actually there is slavery in the Sokoto Caliphate as well.

[00:33:42] I would like to point out at the same time that, you know, there is slavery in the U.S. and in Brazil and, you know, you don't see much of Britain intervening there.

[00:33:50] Some of Britain intervening, but not much, but like, but that ends up destroying it.

[00:33:54] And then, you know, Britain comes in and sets up its own government and all of this.

[00:33:58] So, you know, it's, it's, it would be funny if they didn't have the power to, to actually, you know, end up destroying things, I think.

[00:34:07] So do you see parallels between these type of historical Western interventions and some of their current interventions, whether it's international aid practices or interventions from your multilaterals?

[00:34:23] Do you see the same similar patterns or parallels?

[00:34:28] Yeah, I think there are plenty.

[00:34:29] I think the issue with any kind of economic intervention, regardless of where it is, is that there are always going to be winners and losers to any kind of economic change.

[00:34:38] Right. People will be able to take advantage of the economic change and other people will not.

[00:34:42] Right. And I think the idea that, that there is an economic intervention, which is going to.

[00:34:51] To be good for everybody, you know, that, that simply doesn't exist.

[00:34:56] You know, you only have to look at like U.S. looming tariff policies to understand that, like, those are going to be good for some people and bad for other people.

[00:35:05] Right. And, and most people are already, you know, set up in whatever kind of business they're going to be set up.

[00:35:11] And so if it's bad for them, that's not great.

[00:35:15] So I think, you know, I was recently working on a research project in Zimbabwe and, you know, people kept referring to the fact, it was not related to, to this particular intervention, but people kept referring to the fact that, you know,

[00:35:31] Tony Blair initiated the economic sanctions against Mugabe's regime totally meaning well, right?

[00:35:39] I mean, he was thinking, okay, I can use the economy to, to sort of force this guy to behave, you know, in a way that aligns with what we think of as international norms.

[00:35:50] But the people who were most affected by that were not Mugabe, right?

[00:35:55] Were, you know, just average middle-class Zimbabweans.

[00:36:01] And it had this, you know, devastating impact on the, the Zimbabwe economy.

[00:36:08] Did, you know, did, did it have some kind of impact on, you know, correcting the course of the country?

[00:36:16] I guess ultimately, you know, maybe it did.

[00:36:18] But with this long lasting effect on the middle class in that country.

[00:36:26] So I think that's a sort of good contemporary example of, you know, using these economic tools to try to correct something that the West thinks needs correcting, but not sort of anticipating who it's going to, who it's going to impact the most.

[00:36:43] Interesting, interesting.

[00:36:44] So I guess if we go back to the book and its lessons, what lessons do you think policymakers can learn from Afrocanomics when approaching interventions or whether it's development work on the continent?

[00:37:00] Yeah, I mean, I guess, I guess the sort of simplest takeaway would be, if you think that you're the first person to come up with this idea, you're probably not.

[00:37:12] Yeah, so, you know, if you think agriculture is the key, hopefully you will have read the Thomas Valle Buxton chapter.

[00:37:23] Yeah, I think, I think it's just that like these same interventions keep coming over and over again, you know, the same ideas that like, oh, actually, you know, trade is the answer.

[00:37:32] Oh, actually, you know, competitive advantage is the answer.

[00:37:36] Oh, actually, agriculture is the answer.

[00:37:39] Oh, actually, some kind of educational policy is the answer.

[00:37:44] Right. And that every time there's this sort of hope that there will be some kind of quick fix.

[00:37:50] So I don't really have forward looking.

[00:37:53] I'm a historian.

[00:37:54] I only look back.

[00:37:56] I don't really have forward looking advice, but I hope that people reading this will will at least get a sense that like, you know, if they think that they have a quick fix or if they think that that, you know,

[00:38:07] they've thought of something that nobody has thought of before, that actually probably in the past 200 years, somebody has has thought about this.

[00:38:15] And and I guess what I really hope is that it has some some kind of impact on the way that people think about their own power to do it.

[00:38:25] Right. So if you feel like you have the power to make this kind of intervention, is that a problem?

[00:38:31] You know, should that power really be in the hands of people in these African countries?

[00:38:37] I think I make a sort of plea for democracy at the end, which, you know, is basically to say, I think that we don't give enough credit to people on the continent to hold their own governments accountable.

[00:38:51] I don't think we give enough credit to people on the continent to make their own economic choices.

[00:38:56] I don't think we give enough credit to people on the continent to sort of know more about how to live their lives than, you know, than we do.

[00:39:04] And so hopefully that really is something that people pause, at least if they're if they're thinking about policymaking.

[00:39:12] Thank you for sharing that.

[00:39:13] So I guess if we look closer to yourself as a historian doing the great work that you're doing, how do you manage to balance one, your academic research with engaging broader audiences through books like Afrocanomics?

[00:39:29] Yeah. So, I mean, I think this is like my first attempt to engage broader audiences.

[00:39:37] I mean, I, you know, like I think that there's a lot of this research out there, right?

[00:39:42] Like I said before, I'm not the first person to be doing any of this research myself.

[00:39:49] But my previous research was on these earlier 19th century abolitionist movements and their economic impact on Africa.

[00:39:58] And then, you know, the book brings together that and all these other perspectives.

[00:40:02] And I've spent a lot of time in rooms talking with other academics and other researchers working in these fields.

[00:40:10] And I think we all have a sense of frustration that these these stories are not better known.

[00:40:17] And so the idea with Afrocanomics was actually to to bring all of this deep research that everybody is doing together in a way that would introduce it to a broader audience.

[00:40:28] And, you know, hopefully they'll go into the bibliography and read some of these papers and engage with the sort of deeper research that people are doing out there.

[00:40:39] I think as individual researchers, we are only able to go deep in our little areas.

[00:40:46] And for me, you know, I have a lot of fun in the 19th century.

[00:40:50] So I enjoy I enjoy doing that and I enjoy doing, you know, research projects with collaborators at, you know, at Stellenbosch, as I am at the moment at Zimbabwe, University of Zimbabwe, which I did last year with, you know, partners in Senegal and in Nigeria.

[00:41:07] I think that that's really, really great. And I and I love getting into depth in that way.

[00:41:12] But I think it's also really important that this kind of research gets communicated more widely so that we don't just keep ending up telling the public more generally.

[00:41:22] We don't just keep ending up telling these same stories over and over again while the research is really progressing in these exciting different directions.

[00:41:30] Thank you for that. So, yes, looking to the future, how do you hope your book will influence readers specific understanding of Africa and its economies?

[00:41:43] Yeah, I think I'm hoping that it sort of helps people understand that.

[00:41:49] I mean, you know, it's been a mantra for a while now, but, you know, that Africa is not a country, right, that there are lots of different economies across the continent.

[00:41:58] And the idea that a country like Nigeria is going to have the same kind of concerns for its economy that a country like Chad is going to have, you know, that that that that isn't really that there is no one size fits all kind of approach.

[00:42:15] But also that there is this like deep history of intervention and that, you know, the idea of Africa as a universally or continent in need of, you know, economic rescue by the West is not, you know, that's not actually historically true.

[00:42:33] And it is not necessarily, you know, true even today that there is this vast diversity of experiences and these like, you know, vastly different ways of approaching the economy, the economies of these different countries.

[00:42:46] And, you know, that it is an exciting and varied continent that people don't have to approach with this sense of pity.

[00:42:57] So from the research and the work you're doing, I know this is a very open and general question, but what do you think the future of African economic thought and policy looks like looking ahead, whether it's the next five years?

[00:43:11] Oh, yeah, I'm not very good on the future.

[00:43:18] I think if we're thinking about these cycles of these patterns that I talk about in the book, I think there is there's a moment now of I think in the humanitarian space of shifting towards a like local perspective.

[00:43:37] Um, and I think, you know, that the multipolarity of the moment has definitely given some African governments like more agency and thinking about who they are approaching for economic partnerships, um, and for funding for projects and those kinds of things.

[00:43:57] Um, so I think that that all, you know, and then there's, you know, a huge tech sector boom there.

[00:44:05] Um, I think there's a lot of hope that the kind that the sort of capital that comes through the huge remittances boom, the sort of, you know, the kinds that that that that kind of remittance, um, infusion is actually, you know, doing way more than any other kinds of foreign investment at the moment for, for, um, entrepreneurial takeoff on the continent.

[00:44:30] All of these sort of factors could be hopeful.

[00:44:37] Um, and I think that it is a, is a moment, um, in terms of African continental economic thought to, to be paying a lot of attention to how the West is talking about, um, the dangers of Chinese intervention, the dangers of Russian intervention, the dangers of, um,

[00:45:00] you know, of losing the kinds of power that it has had.

[00:45:03] Right.

[00:45:04] So for sure it is worth always being on guard about whoever the foreign, um, foreign intervention is coming from.

[00:45:13] Um, but I think also that the, the situation in the, you know, 1870s and 80s would, would come to mind as being relevant here in terms of that, that cyclical structure that, you know,

[00:45:30] as soon as, uh, as soon as that power shifts or that agency shifts to African leaders to choose or to, you know, African business people to choose who they want to do business with.

[00:45:44] The pattern in the, in the 1870s and 80s was, you know, that as, as people, as Britain perceived a sort of shift to, oh no, you know, they're doing business with the Germans, they're doing business with the Americans.

[00:45:57] That was the moment when the scramble, um, happened, right.

[00:46:01] Because they wanted to shut down those avenues of, of agency, right.

[00:46:05] They wanted to sort of monopolize the trade.

[00:46:08] Um, and so I would, I would say that like, I am very hopeful that, you know, those things that I mentioned will lead to, um, you know, a sort of economic boom.

[00:46:18] Um, I would just say, you know, be wary of attempts to sort of re-monopolize that power.

[00:46:25] Quote of the week.

[00:46:26] As people, we often have quotes, mantras, proverbs, affirmations that keep us going when times are challenging or when times are good.

[00:46:34] Do you have one that you can share with us today?

[00:46:38] Um, yeah, I like to, I like to remind myself to stay curious.

[00:46:45] Um, yeah.

[00:46:48] Um, yeah, I think, I think there's a tendency amongst, um, academics or experts more generally to, you know, think that we always have the answers.

[00:46:58] And I think it's more about, you know, having the questions rather than the answers, staying curious.

[00:47:04] Fantastic.

[00:47:05] What a perfect way to end today's conversation.

[00:47:09] Bronwyn, thank you for joining us and sharing your in-depth knowledge, I guess,

[00:47:13] into some of the complexities of history of Western economic intervention in Africa.

[00:47:20] And I've enjoyed reading the book.

[00:47:22] I've not finished it yet, but I'm close to the end.

[00:47:26] Good.

[00:47:27] But it's definitely helped me kind of challenge some of those entrenched, whether you call them narratives or notions,

[00:47:34] and also consider some of the unique economic traditions and knowledge systems that have been on the continent for history or years, decades, centuries.

[00:47:47] So, yeah, thank you for that.

[00:47:48] Um, it's been an absolute pleasure having you on the podcast and we will definitely keep in touch.

[00:47:54] Thank you so much.

[00:47:55] This was really fun.

[00:47:56] Speak soon.

[00:47:58] Thank you to everyone who has listened and stayed tuned to the podcast.

[00:48:02] If you've enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, share or tell a friend about it.

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[00:48:13] Thank you and see you next week for the Unlocking Africa podcast.