Economist says Africa is heading towards bright economic future

Image via Wikipedia

Map of Africa indicating Gross Domestic Product per capita (2009?)

Business & Money
Economist says Africa is heading towards bright economic future
By Julio Godoy
Updated Sep 7, 2010 - 10:48:18 AM

PARIS (IPS/GIN) - Africa is heading towards a bright economic future, according to a new book co-authored by the former director of the French state agency for economic cooperation and released recently in Paris.

In the book “Le temps de l'Afrique” (“The African Age”), Jean-Michel Severino, until last April director of the French state agency for economic cooperation, and his co-author Olivier Ray maintain that sub-Saharan Africa has started the new millennium under far better economic and social circumstances than generally assumed.

The book has received mixed reviews with some doubting its optimism.

To support their thesis that “Africa is rushing towards affluence,” as Severino put it in an interview, the authors use the most recent economic and social data, showing rapid economic growth, high investment and sinking poverty.

“The vision that we in Europe have of Africa—of a continent frozen in poverty and disease—is simply wrong,” Severino declared. “On the contrary, today's sub-Saharan Africa is a region of high economic growth, with numerous business opportunities. Sub-Saharan Africa is now a high speed train rushing towards affluence and prosperity.”

Severino recalled that since the beginning of the century, the sub-Saharan African economy “has grown by a yearly average rate of 5.5 percent, against only 1.35 percent in the euro zone.”

Severino quoted a recent study by the U.S. National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), which shows that African poverty “is falling rapidly.”

Read more @ Final Final Call

tags: africa, development, economics, political economy, post-colonial

Related articles by Zemanta

• Is Africa poised for steady, rapid growth? (economist.com)
• Afghanistan & Sub-Saharan Africa Have World's Greatest Food Security Risk: New Report (geteconow.com)
• Africa Doesn't Want or Need UK Aid (humanrights.change.org)
• The Economist has a new blog focusing on Africa (loomnie.com)
• Donald Kaberuka: 'Africa can now be proud of AFDB' (cnn.com)
• AFRICA: Africa's Economic House Divided (project-syndicate.org)
• Africa, AFRICOM, and the Private Military Economy
• How America Underdevelops Africa: Death, Plunder, Resistance

Angélique Kidjo Speaks (Nicholas Kristof-NYTimes)

Angélique Kidjo gets down with fan.Image by heartonastick via FlickrMost people don’t know that the pantheon of the “Vudun” Gods from Benin is as rich and complex as the Greeks’. Our rhythms spread throughout Brazil, Cuba and New Orleans during the period of the slave trade. I have been to Salvador de Bahia and Havana and heard people sing songs from my village, all kept alive for centuries by the African diaspora.

Angélique Kidjo

As a French colony, Dahomey provided lots of civil servants for much of the West African region. It used to be called the “Latin Quarter” of Africa because of its number of intellectuals and doctors. And so although I was already making a living as a teenager with my singing career, my parents insisted that I dedicate myself to school because we lived in such a great educational and cultural environment. By the 10th grade, I was already studying philosophy, and debating the merits of Rousseau and Camus with my friends.


 
One could expect that independence would be an easy path for my country. But Dahomey was plagued with the same problems that affected other African countries. Colonists had drawn the borders of these countries without any ethnic or historical consideration. Different traditional nations were forced to coexist and the French rulers always favored a particular group – in Dahomey’s case, the people from its Southern region – to help them govern the country. I was from the South, and, though my family was not rich, we were privileged.

 
 
When the many political intrigues made the country unstable, a military group came from the North and took power in 1972, hoping that wealth would be redistributed equally. This group also thought that eradicating Western culture and influence would be a solution to all of our problems. Marxism-Leninism was officially adopted by the state. Before I could speak with anyone I saw on the street, I had to salute them with “Ready for Revolution, the fight goes on!” Everyone stood behind the revolution when the famous French mercenary Bob Denard, following orders given to him by the French secret service, tried in vain to invade Benin.

 

 

 But the revolution cut off the country from the rest of the world and almost destroyed its educational system. As a singer, the only thing I could do was to praise the revolution and sing at political gatherings. I felt I could no longer express myself and one day in 1983, without telling anyone, I escaped the country. I realized on that day that the dream of a proud independent Africa had been broken.

 

 

Since that day, even though I’ve lived and worked in exile, I’ve drawn almost all of my inspiration from the incredible richness of my culture. Most people don’t know that the pantheon of the “Vudun” Gods from Benin is as rich and complex as the Greeks’. Our rhythms spread throughout Brazil, Cuba and New Orleans during the period of the slave trade. I have been to Salvador de Bahia and Havana and heard people sing songs from my village, all kept alive for centuries by the African diaspora.


 
Read entire essay @ Daughter of Independence - NYTimes.com

 

Related articles by Zemanta

• Votes or voodoo (bbc.co.uk)
• African troops march in Paris Bastille Day parade (sfgate.com)
• How America underdevelops Africa: death, plunder, resistance 
• A History of New Orleans Voodoo

Africa at 50: An Overview | The Zeleza Post

Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki (C), Eritrean Minister for Agriculture Arefaine Berhe (R), Ethiopia Prime Minister Meles Zenawi (2nd R), Djibouti President Ismail Omar Guelleh (2nd L) and Sudan's

President Omar Hassan al-Bashir cut a cake to commemorate the 20th anniversary of

 the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) in the Kenyan capital Nairobi

March 20, 2006.  REUTERS

By Paul Zeleza 

1960 is often called the year of African independence because of the unprecedented number of countries--seventeen--that achieved their independence. It might more appropriately be termed the year of West and Central African independence as these countries were mostly from the two regions (except for Madagascar and Somalia). They were also predominantly former French colonies (save for Nigeria and Somalia). In the annals of African decolonization, these countries won independence largely through peaceful struggle, unlike much of Southern Africa and countries like Kenya, and Algeria where protracted armed struggles were waged.

Evaluating the last fifty years for such a large and diverse continent is not easy. The task is perhaps best approached from the vantage point of the goals of African nationalism, the expectations of uhuru. Clearly, African nationalist movements were quite complex and diverse in their development, organization, strategies, and ideologies. Nevertheless, it can be argued that, collectively, they sought to achieve five historic and humanistic objectives: decolonization, nation-building, development, democracy, and regional integration.

Decolonization was one of the great historical events of the twentieth century and a remarkable achievement for African peoples. Over the next 34 years, the winds of independence blew across the rest of the continent culminating in the demise of apartheid in South Africa in 1994. The road to independence took much longer than this; it started in 1922 when Egypt got limited self-government, and gathered momentum from 1951 with Libya's independence, followed in 1956 by Sudan, Tunisia, and Morocco, and in 1957 Ghana.

But decolonization did not often translate into self-determination as the former colonial powers continued to exert strong influence over their former colonies. This was especially the case in the former French colonies, which remained firmly tied to French economic, political, and military institutions, interests and interventions. In addition, the newly independent states became pawns in superpower Cold War rivalries, which often turned into deadly proxy wars in the Third World. The end of the Cold War, emergence of new global powers such as China (which is now the world's second largest economy after having overtaken Japan), and transformations within the continent itself seem to offer new opportunities for fulfilling the dreams of decolonization.
 
The record of performance on the other four agendas of African nationalism is extremely complex and uneven across postcolonial periods, countries and regions, social classes, economic sectors, genders and age groups, which fit neither into the unrelenting gloom of the Afropessimists or the unyielding hopes of the Afroptimists.

Read entire essay @The Zeleza Post

tags: post-colonial

Related articles by Zemanta

• Can democracy thrive in Africa? (cnn.com)
• Colonialism and the 'scramble for Africa' (cnn.com)
• Daughter of Independence (kristof.blogs.nytimes.com)
• Africa marks 50 years of freedom for 1/3 of continent (thegrio.com)
• Democracy is hypocrisy (Malcolm X)

The DR Congo at 50- "I would like to become white" (Dap @ Jemima)

My dream is to become a nurse, or if not, go to Europe. I'd like to marry a white man and become white myself. I couldn't be completely white, that's not possible, but cream is good for whitening the skin.

So would it be a mistake for African Americans to read this as internalized self-hate? Or should we assume that something entirely different and specific to Congo is going on? Below, I push against two opposing positions:

1) that Africans (i.e. black people) get the same message everywhere or that

2) the traditional black North American analysis (internalized "self-hate") is outmoded. 

Context certainly matters. But the flip side is that we can try so hard to be sophisticated in our analysis that we can miss the obvious. I have seen about half of west Africa and I have talked about race with Africans all over the continent for about 13 years. Every nation in Africa that I know of has individuals who struggle with internalized self-hate (in many instances the white Jesus complex is a primary culprit).

Yes we can go on for hours about complexity and nuance. In fact just yesterday I came across a quote from a DRC villager who has a very astute critique of Europeans (p.14) Perhaps we could do the city-village thing and hypothesize that urban people are more colonized than village folks. We can raise issues about translation and what not. Indeed, we can dance around this issue all day and night. But I don't think its off the mark to conclude that this young sister who talks about bleaching her beautiful black skin, becoming white and marrying a white man is struggling with a colonized mentality.

Would it be better to consider that this Congolese sister desires a better life as opposed to wanting pale skin?

Certainly. But we have been raising these same questions in the US for centuries. When someone desires a better life by bleaching or marrying white or passing it suggests that the individual or group in question is suffered from internalized self-hate. That was Biko's (1970s) analysis. And before him Malcolm X (1960s). And before him Marcus Garvey (1920s). And before him David Walker (1829, p.11). Internalized self-hate and the desire for a better life are not mutually exclusive. The desire to seek a better station in life by bleaching your skin or marrying white people are outcomes of racism/white supremacy. You don't have to understand racism to be a victim of racism.

However, there is a danger in imposing African American assumptions on DRC realities. Clearly, internalized self-hate in DRC is not quite the same as internalized self-hate in Compton or Chicago. But I happen to think that internalized self-hate is a good baseline from which to think more comprehensively about the universal impact of white supremacy in specific places. So, again, my argument is that self-hate and the desire for a better life are not mutually exclusive. An externally imposed (i.e. imposed by white people) inferiority complex is the baseline from which we may raise a host of issues both local and translocal. The mistake, therefore, is not drawing upon older models or black North American models. Rather, the mistake would be to stop asking questions beyond the (correct) assumption of self-loathing.

View more @BBC News - In pictures: The DR Congo at 50

tags: congo, race, post-colonial, aesthetics, beauty, mental slavery

Related articles by Zemanta

• Who taught you to hate yourself?
• Why the scourge of skin lightening needs a pan-African response
• Skin lightening is serious business in India (thegrio.com)
• India's myth of fair-skinned beauty (guardian.co.uk)