Justus For All

R.J. Rummel at Democratic Peace has an interesting post up on Africa and why it is so hard to ‘fix.’

To Understand Africa, Understand Its Culture

The reason for their failure was tribal culture. Those of us from more individualistic backgrounds assume that our accomplishments, our savings, our capital accumulations and our property are our own–to keep and use as we see fit. But the tribal staff members were powerless to resist the demands of their families, and other members of their tribes, who immediately made claim to what they perceived as the accumulated wealth of their compatriots. They demanded chickens, money and so on, which eventually decimated the flocks and depleted the working capital of the businesses–no amount of reasoning could persuade insistent tribal members that their demands would “kill the goose that lays the golden egg.” In the subsistence, communal culture of a tribe, keeping resources for oneself is simply unacceptable.Most of the many tribal cultures in Africa are highly communal. Our fairy tale warning against “the killing of the goose that lays the golden egg” has no tribal equivalent, nor is there a tribal equivalent for the Judeo-Christian commandment against covetousness (”Do not be envious of your neighbor’s house. Do not be envious of your neighbor’s wife, his slave, his maid, his ox, his donkey, or anything else that is your neighbor’s.”). Nor do African tribal cultures encourage, as do many of the Asian cultures, entrepreneurship based on small family groups who all contribute to the success of family businesses. Hopefully this cultural base will change with time, but in the short run I am not optimistic.

I am no expert on Africa, so I have no way to evaluate whether this characterization of African tribal cultures is true or not.  I do though care about Africa, it is a continent that has always fascinated me and I would love to see it become a successful place.  From a more selfish perspective, I am pretty sure that any region that doesn’t succeed will become a direct danger to those areas that do.

Rummel also draws some parallels with tribal african cultures and contemporary African-American culture, something that I am sure some people would find quite distasteful.  Personally, I don’t care if something is ‘PC’ or not, but whether it is accurate or not.  If we don’t understand the problem, or even worse refuse to even consider a problem that doesn’t fit our desired world view, we can’t solve it.

I don’t know that I am convinced that Rummel is on to something here, but it does seem worthy of some consideration.