Africa’s challenges aren’t about race and culture, they’re about geography and policy: Ivo Vegter

Key topics:

• Racist “culture” explanations for African underdevelopment are false

• Geography, climate, and trade shaped societies more than race or culture

• Policy choices and weak institutions, not skin colour, hinder African progress

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By Ivo Vegter*

The painful history of South Africa produced a polarised, divided commentariat, but blaming each other isn’t entirely justified, and isn’t a solution.

The other day, some anonymous noisemakers in the comment section thought fit to unburden themselves of the presumption that differences in economic success can be attributed to differences in culture.

Despite using phrases like “black culture”, “black tribes” and “Zulu”, they insisted that they were not being racist, because they were talking about culture, and the cultures they were talking about had no understanding of, or even words for, “corruption”, “accountability” and “maintenance”.

I don’t speak Zulu, so I’m not in a position to call bullshit, but I will, anyway. Google certainly had no difficulty translating those words into what looks nothing like English. Perhaps some Zulu-speaking readers can confirm in the comments.

Anyway, the theory was that Chinese culture (but not race, you understand) is why Singapore has been more successful than Malaysia, and Jewish culture explains why 20 million Jewish people have won more Nobel Prizes in Physics than a billion Africans. (And here I thought it was because Jews secretly rule the world.)

By analogy, this “culture” analysis explains why white people are just better at running a country than black people. Not that that’s racist, you understand.

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Now I don’t consider these views to be representative of the Daily Friend’s readership. While some commenters make valuable contributions to the discussion, many are just there to tell me how much of a Marxist I am. These comment-section regulars tend to be people who have nothing better to do with their time than spew their “truth” online, and have nowhere else to go because everyone else has closed their comment sections because of all the obnoxious racists.

As Yeats wrote: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

Traditional counter

The white right in South Africa has been enjoying a “told you so” glow ever since Jacob Zuma took office as president and sold the country to his friends and benefactors.

What they mean is that they predicted that a majority-black government would be the cause of South Africa’s ruin, just as it has been in many other post-colonial countries in Africa.

The usual counter-argument to this racist view is that South Africa had been colonised for almost 350 years, and it takes more than just a few decades to undo the pernicious legacy of oppression.

Both these views are so simplistic as to be wrong.

It certainly does take a long time to erase the visible legacy of colonialism, but the South African government could have done a lot better than it has in the last 30 years.

Not selling the levers of power to the highest bidder, and fostering a high-growth economy backed by bountiful natural resources and abundant labour would have gone a long way towards eliminating poverty and unemployment.

The white right would argue that civilised Europeans with advanced technologies arrived in Africa and found nothing but warring Iron Age tribes, who benefited enormously from the infrastructure and institutions (and Bibles) that the colonisers brought with them.

Polarisation

These are powerfully polarising narratives that continue to divide races that have historically been divided by political decree.

Both contain elements of truth, but both are overly simplistic.

Many of the core aspects of colonialism were clearly evil, and the formalisation of racial segregation by the Afrikaner nationalists in the early 20th century, backed by their peculiar reading of the Bible, was both morally repugnant and economically naïve.

Yet neither colonialism nor apartheid were the sole reasons for differences in development between different population groups, and while they are certainly to blame for many of the country’s present problems, they cannot bear the blame for all of them.

Moreover, as I wrote in an article way back in 2012, it is a myth to believe that the white supremacist regime prior to 1994 was more competent or substantially more ethical than the government of today. It even had a prototype for state capture in the Broederbond.

Likewise, the reductionism of the notion that a government run by black people cannot work because black people don’t understand words like “maintenance” and “accountability” is a calumny that cannot stand, even if South Africa’s perilous condition superficially appears to bear this out.

I addressed the myth of the incompetent black government in 2016: government corruption and mismanagement is not a function of race. I also answered the “told ya” commenters in 2022: Have the Nats been proven right?

These racially divisive accounts of South Africa’s fate are not historically correct. They are not very useful to understand South Africa’s present condition, and they do not light the way forward.

Climate

Pre-modern economic and cultural development occurred at different rates in different places around the globe, but they weren’t so much determined by race as they were by environmental factors.

Climate and geography were important drivers of development in pre-modern societies. Settled agriculture could thrive in temperate regions, but less so at very high or very low latitudes.

The minor differences between seasons in the tropics also had a major impact on how people organised and structured their lives. If crops would grow year-round and the hunting was always good, then societies were less dependent on planning and structure.

If, by contrast, you couldn’t grow anything in winter, then life had to become better planned by force of nature, since provision had to be made for the long cold months.

Africa was simply better suited to a semi-nomadic, close-to-the-land sort of lifestyle. In Africa, there was less need for protection from the cold, which influenced construction techniques and the development of textiles in cooler climates.

Geography

An even bigger determinant of the development of early societies was trade. Trade is a universal driver not only of prosperity, but also of technological development and the cross-cultural pollination of ideas.

The continents of the northern hemisphere are well-supplied with long, wide and deep navigable rivers.

In Europe, the Danube, Po, Don, Rhine, Rhône, Seine, Loire, Elbe, Volga, Dnieper, Oder, Tagus, Thames, Severn and Shannon are all major navigable rivers.

In North America, the Mississippi Basin alone is navigable from the Gulf of Mexico all the way to Minneapolis, where a short 10km hop could get you to the Chicago River, which is navigable through to the Great Lakes.

China has over 100,000km of navigable rivers, including the Yangtze, Yellow, Pearl, Xijiang, and Huangpu rivers.

In the Middle East, major civilisations formed around the Tigris, Euphrates, Jordan and Nile rivers.

These river basins not only created ideal conditions for settled agriculture and the establishment of cities – the Mississippi Basin being the largest contiguous arable zone in the world – but they also became corridors of trade that stretched hundreds, or thousands of kilometres from the coast into the interior.

The northern hemisphere continents are also rich in coastal inlets and protected bays. Having been scoured by glaciers, their irregular coastlines provided many good locations for harbours and broke up strong oceanic currents. This was essential for the development of coastal trade.

Africa, by contrast

Now consider Africa. Although it is a very large continent, it has no navigable rivers to speak of, other than the last 1,000km of the Nile and the last 300km of the Niger.

The northern third of the continent is desert, and southern and east Africa mostly lie on an elevated plateau that drops off sharply near the coast, making the great river systems of the region, like the Congo, the Zambezi and the Orange, inaccessible from the sea.

Africa’s coastline is also very smooth. There are no nice fjords and firths and deep-water inlets like Chesapeake Bay to facilitate coastal shipping trade. Instead, Africa is surrounded by fast-flowing currents that scour the coasts, fill the bays and river mouths with sand, and make coastal navigation treacherous.

Today, water transport is on average about half the cost of rail transport, which in turn is about half the cost of road transport. Several centuries ago, transport by road was several times more expensive than rail, which was in turn several times more expensive than shipping by river and sea.

It stands to reason that societies with greater access to navigable waterways could develop much faster through trade. By contrast, Africa had hardly any rivers suitable for shipping, and rail was also difficult or impossible to extend across many of its geographic obstacles.

Combine that with a massive, isolated interior with difficult terrain, and it shouldn’t come as a surprise that trade networks through Africa were limited and unable to create the sort of prosperity that trade produced in China, Europe and North America.

Between a climate that didn’t demand structured societies and great technological innovation, a lack of interchange with foreign cultures, and low levels of trade, that Africa remained undeveloped for longer than northern hemisphere societies should be no surprise.

There was simply no incentive to develop advanced economies, when trade was largely limited to neighbouring tribes instead of reaching global markets.

This is not a reflection on the character, industry or intelligence of Africa’s people, and it has nothing to do with their skin colour. (That this still needs saying in 2025 is a profoundly sad reality. The people who prompted me to write this should hang their heads in shame.)

Colonial exploitation

Once the great empires of the north extended their shipping routes around the world, there followed a period of colonial exploitation. This is commonly, and accurately, described as the “scramble for Africa”. Great empires competed to lay claim to natural resources to feed their mercantilist, insulated, protectionist economies.

Just as African tribes often went to war with one another over land and resources, so did the empires of Europe, and later also China, Japan and the Americas.

The character of colonisation differed greatly from one colony to the next, and from one coloniser to the next, but even the most benign of them were not there primarily to benefit the locals.

They weren’t there to stimulate trade or local development. They were in it to extract resources, maintain strategic military advantages, and spread their religion.

The end of the colonial era, brought about by the expense and destruction of two world wars which Africa did nothing to cause, coincided with the advent of the Cold War.

Gradually freed from the grip of warring colonial empires, Africa now became caught between two opposing superpowers. This played a major role in the next stage of Africa’s under-development: the failure to establish and nurture the institutions that produce success.

Cold War

In 2019, I wrote: “The great triumph of the Cold War is that Western liberalism proved to be more successful than Soviet communism. The great tragedy of the Cold War is that it condemned so many countries newly liberated from colonialism to Marxist authoritarianism and poverty.”

The West’s reluctance to give up its colonies, and the opportunistic Soviet support for African liberation movements, created in Africa a great appreciation for socialism.

Capitalism became associated with colonial domination and exploitation, while socialist internationalism was associated with freedom, human rights and self-determination. This might have been factually wrong, but who wouldn’t side with the Marxists under these circumstances?

For most African countries, “liberation” did not mean economic freedom. (Witness Julius Malema’s perverse misuse of the term.)

Liberation meant throwing off the yoke of the colonial masters, seizing the levers of power, and replacing the former oppressors with a home-grown elite.

At the same time, that elite was being supported, educated and indoctrinated by Soviet universities and propagandists. They were fed socialism as the cure-all to the woes of colonialism (and to the “colonialism of a special type” that was apartheid).

Different trajectory

I called this a tragedy because establishing the right institutions could have put Africa on a very different trajectory.

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As Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson argue in Why Nations Fail, technology has largely neutralised climate and geography as determinants of economic prosperity. Instead, nations succeed or fail to the extent that they adopt institutions that support economic progress.

These institutions include a broadly inclusive society in which everyone participates in the economy; a society that is open to trade and exchange with foreign nations, and welcomes foreign immigrants; secure private property rights that enables orderly trade as well as capital formation; a legal system that is independent and facilitates peaceful resolution of contract disputes; the rule of law, as opposed to the rule of men, constraining the government from abusing the rights of citizens; academic institutions that support technical innovation; business regulations that encourage economic activity and entrepreneurship; and a pluralistic political system in which all of society feels invested and represented.

Some former colonies, as well as countries that were destroyed by war, such as Japan, Western Europe, Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Chile, Mauritius, as well as Australia, Canada, New Zealand and of course the United States, adopted such institutions, and have thrived.

Many African countries, including South Africa, did not.

Pre- and post-liberation

Before the liberation from apartheid, South Africa chose a policy of segregation, economic nationalism, protectionism and eventually, autarky, rather than one of inclusivity, free markets and flourishing trade relations.

After the liberation, the transition to a democracy with a universal franchise was a major step in the right direction. Unfortunately, the ideological direction of the ruling party was socialism, which centralised political power, rewarded corruption, and enriched only a narrow new elite.

In South Africa, the slide into dysfunction was gradual, but the definite cause of its current economic malaise can be found not in the inability of black people to run a government, or their oppression by white people, but in the government’s deliberate policy choices.

These policy choices were caused by the lily-white conflict of the Cold War. The National Democratic Revolution was inspired by lily-white communists, and adopted by the ANC as the surest route to socialism. Race really had nothing to do with it.

Unity

Instead of dividing South Africa by blaming the other races, either for colonialism or for corruption, we should be able to find unity in the common recognition of our historical challenges and present policy choices.

The historical obstacles to the development of South Africa and Africa were largely based on climate and geography, neither of which were conducive to flourishing trade relations and technological innovation.

When the means became available to overcome those hurdles, Africa was hampered by policy choices that reflected its position as a pawn in the Cold War, when Soviet ideology captured Africa and its liberation movements.

As a result, most of Africa, including South Africa, never prioritised the institutions that are essential for economic progress and prosperity.

We can cast about for reasons to blame people who don’t look or speak like us. We can look for justifications for our own racial prejudices, and appeal to the fig leaf of “culture”. But this will not solve South Africa’s problems, and can only make them worse.

Instead, we ought to be united in the demand for free markets, property rights, the rule of law, and – in the absence of navigable rivers – well-functioning railways and ports.

I’m no historian, but that’s my theory.

*Ivo Vegter is a freelance journalist, columnist and speaker who loves debunking myths and misconceptions, and addresses topics from the perspective of individual liberty and free markets.

This article was first published by Daily Friend and is republished with permission