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Lessons from the World Cup. “Casual knowledge” about Africa has been the continent’s biggest headache
We are writing at a historic moment, just after the first FIFA World Cup held in Africa. During those moments, the vuvuzelas were in control; and for once Africa had the world in thrall.
Not surprisingly, many were hoping that this would be the historic opportunity Africa needs, to re-brand itself. Millions were compelled to look Africa’s way, and by so doing to learn a bit more about the place, and, hopefully, to banish some of the prejudice and ignorance that has been the bane of the continent throughout modern times.
We would like to put forward a provocative counter-thesis. We are inclined to make the argument that this kind of “casual knowledge” about Africa has in fact been the continent’s biggest headache. It has led to disrespect for the intricacies of the African situation and has fostered the outpouring of a huge tsunami of dubious information about this part of the world once held in “productive awe” by explorers and historians.
On the back of this corrupt knowledge a whole edifice of flawed so-called “development interventions” have been carried into the continent in contempt of its unique and extraordinary ethnography.
And while it has become fashionable nowadays to fight over the merits of this “development industry”, reforms are urged under the inspiration of these same tenuous epistemologies about Africa, which have now concretised onto the tablets of stone in the ark of the global development covenant.
Africa is naturally endowed
Consider the notion that Africa is “exceptionally natural resource – rich”. The Chinese are on the continent, peering under every moss, with the blessings of a bunch of development economists beholden to this belief, and a new debt crisis – this time, East-induced – hangs over Africa’s horizon as a consequence of this myth.
Yet, the truth is that on a per capita and per square mile basis, Africa is more naturally endowed only in comparison with Asia. The data is widely available to debunk this “natural abundance” myth, in the tons of mineralogical surveys conducted since the last century and in the biodiversity maps strewn across every public library in the world.
Yet, an image of a lush, green, continent, swimming in mineral wealth, continues to be peddled. When in fact Africa is largely desert. Its Congo basin is the anomaly not the norm, just as the wealth of Congo, South Africa, Guinea and Angola are disproportionately concentrated and totally unrepresentative of the comparative endowment of Africa in natural terms, which is unremarkable by global standards.
Another myth is that of a continent frozen in an agrarian frieze. Every set of development statistics over the past two decades relating to every typical African state comes up with the same dubious figure of “65 percent to 70 percent” as the proportion of the population engaged in agriculture.
Yet, the same set will yield an urban population percentage of 40 percent, ridiculously suggesting that 100 percent of Africans in the rural areas are farmers and have remained so for the past two decades. Anyone who has visited rural Africa knows this cannot be true, and anyone who has observed Africa long enough knows that, increasingly, urban hustling matches rural subsistence in the scope and vivacity of Africa’s modern experience.
Casual knowledge feed the myths
The militant myths which collectively constitute mainstream knowledge about Africa are too numerous to recount here, and do not dissolve away in the face of the kind of relaxed exposure to Africa advocated by the enthusiasts described above. Casual knowledge feeds the quenchless fire of such myths like oxygen feeds the rust.
They include the tendency to attribute ethnic discord to colonialism, in stark disregard for the ethnographic experience of never-colonised Ethiopia, which in any scientific investigation would definitely qualify as a “control”.
Another myth is the overemphasis on corruption as the key governance issue, even though most corruption indices evidence clear unintelligibility when benchmarked against human development indices, a crucial assay for the effects of governance.
These myths persist because the overkill of casual knowledge blunts the force of curiosity. It weakens the yearning for deep and rich ethnography, and institutionalises a kind of militant obtuseness, in which the more one listens the less one hears. A good many of the development industry veterans on the continent are afflicted with this kind of catatonia.
We suspect that things were better when people told fabulous tales about Africa, as a haven of the undiscovered and the unexplored, such as, say, in Roman times and during the earlier Portuguese voyages. This is when curiosity drove the most ardent anthropologists and ethnographers to the earthen-spires of the Western Sudan and to the stones of Great Zimbabwe, and when such savants returned to write careful and original treatises full of respect for authenticity rather than authority. Ibn Battuta comes to mind.
The waning of this light was followed by the harsh glare of the slave trade and colonialism when unexamined authority began this wave of perverted “African studies”, and laid the basis for the casual knowledge we rail against above.
So we say, if the vuvuzelas call out to you again, and you feel compelled to respond, come to Africa with awe and wonder, and you shall never leave with your ignorance intact.
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