When Gunnar Myrdal’s Asian Drama was published nearly 50 years ago, Africa was on a par economically with Asia and brimming with potential. So what went wrong? African Drama will explore how Asia responded to the challenges that Myrdal pinpointed in his book and what lessons, if any, Africa can take from this.

It’s late September as I’m writing this, and it’s a sweltering 29 degrees centigrade in Nairobi. Peering outside, I notice a pair of African striped skink lizards looking for a spot to sun themselves. On days like this I wish I were cold-blooded. But this blog post is not about the oppressive heat or my regrets about being warm-blooded. This post is about the thinking behind this blog and its title, African Drama. So, welcome dear reader.

The Perfect Opening

Every writer dreams of the perfect opening, the kind of opening that will reel in the reader like a fish on a hook. In the pantheon of perfect openings, few are more perfect than the following one: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness….” That’s the opening to Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities and a more perfect description of the French Revolution I doubt you’re going to find!

Here’s another opening that should have made it to the pantheon of perfect openings: “How did the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro and his small, ragtag force of 168 Spanish soldiers, unfamiliar with the terrain, ignorant of the local inhabitants, and far beyond the reach of timely reinforcements, effortlessly manage to capture the Inca emperor Atahuallpa, absolute monarch of the largest and most advanced state in the New World, in the middle of his own empire of millions of subjects and surrounded by his army of 80,000 soldiers?” Perhaps not as pithy or poetic as, “It was the best of times”, but quite dramatic nonetheless. So why isn’t it in the pantheon of perfect openings? Because it was never written!

I have stitched together that opening from chapter three of Jared Diamond’s 1997 magnum opus Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. If I were Jared Diamond’s publisher, that passage would have been the opening I would have chosen for the book for besides whetting the reader’s appetite, it also neatly illustrates the question that Diamond seeks to answer in his book, namely, if we all emerged from Africa some 100,000 to 200,000 years ago with a similar set of skills and tools, how did our paths diverge so remarkably that ultimately all it took to bring the mighty Inca empire to its knees was a mere handful of European soldiers?

The idea that economic development might have been strongly determined by the physical environment, one of the key claims that Diamond makes in Guns, Germs and Steel, is not new. A glance at the world map will reveal the striking geographic concentration of economic development in the so-called northern hemisphere, North America and northwest Europe in particular, while the majority of the less-developed countries are in the southern hemisphere. Can this be a coincidence? Jared Diamond’s thesis that favourable natural endowments could have helped the West pull ahead of the rest of the world though not new has rarely been presented as compellingly as in Guns, Germs and Steel.

Of course, natural endowments by themselves cannot be the full explanation and even Diamond does not claim this. Poor countries are often endowed with vast natural resources and one can even make the opposite argument: that life in the tropics was so easy that people became lazy and averse to change! One of the authors who has attempted to tackle the question of why poor countries are poor at great length is the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal and he did this in his magisterial three-volume study of South Asia titled Asian Drama: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Nations, published in 1968. To this we now turn.

From Asian Drama to African Drama

As I mentioned above, Asian Drama runs to three volumes. Thankfully, in 1971 an abridged edition of the work was published and this is the version I will be referring to here. When Asian Drama was released, Africa was on a par economically with Asia and brimming with potential. Yet in the succeeding three decades, Asia managed to pull far ahead of Africa, while Africa seemed to stagnate and in some cases even regress. In fact, it is sobering to note that if you replaced the word Asia in Asian Drama with the word Africa, there would be very little need to change anything else in a book published nearly half a century ago! To put it another way, a visitor from the 1960’s would still recognise Africa, but that same visitor would barely recognise Kuala Lumpur or Singapore.

Doubtlessly there are some who will accuse me of sounding like an “afro-pessimist,” but my goal here is not to write Africa off as a lost cause. I do not doubt it when Stephen Enke, one of the fathers of so-called development economics, says that in the 1950’s and 60’s, Africa’s prospects were actually much brighter than Asia’s. I wish to find out what went wrong in Africa and what can be done to turn things around and in this effort I shall be using Myrdal’s Asian Drama as a handbook of sorts. Since for us the converse of the question what went wrong in Africa is why did things work out so much better in Asia, we will be looking at how Asia responded to the challenges that Myrdal pinpoints in his book. Finally, we will be asking, is the Asian path still a viable path or even a desirable path for Africa, and if not, what other options are available?

The Prostitution of Economics

Myrdal starts his book by bemoaning not the material conditions of post-colonial Asia but the moral and intellectual poverty of economics during the Cold War. No one can doubt the deadly seriousness of the Cold War. It led to many prolonged and savage proxy wars all over the world, and for a few very tense days in 1962, the world actually hovered on the brink of nuclear Armageddon!

Truth, as they say, is the first casualty in war and Myrdal would agree that this adage holds doubly true for the Cold War, for during the Cold War scientific truth too became a victim of the war. Myrdal is convinced that the sudden interest in economic development following the Second World War was not driven primarily by an interest in solving the problems of the underdeveloped countries but rather it reflected the political and military interests of the Cold War antagonists. As the Cold War powers sought to win over more underdeveloped countries as allies, intellectual integrity was readily sacrificed. One example that Myrdal gives of the shameful betrayal of intellectual honesty is the use of euphemisms, what we might today call “political correctness.” Thus, in scholarly writings, words like “free” were being applied to countries simply because they were not allies of the Soviet Union, never mind that they were run by psychopathic despots. There was also a growing hesitancy to refer to countries as “underdeveloped” and the term “developing” was increasingly preferred, never mind that there might be very little sign that they was any development going on at all!

For Myrdal, such an approach besides being condescending to the folks in poor countries, did nothing to solve their real problems, such as bad leadership. More idealistically, it was a betrayal of what Myrdal calls “the universal and timeless values that are our legacy from the Enlightenment.” Myrdal understands that intellectual activity does not happen in a vacuum, that there is no such thing as a “disinterested” social science and that what we choose to study and the approach we use are factors heavily conditioned by the society in which we live and the political climate. But Myrdal is still adamant that a scientist’s first allegiance must be to the truth and political correctness be damned!

Though the Cold War may be over, the willingness to prostitute economics for ideological purposes seems very much alive. In my opinion, too much of contemporary mainstream economics is little more than an apologia for capitalism, effectively turning economics into theology and economists into defenders of the orthodoxy rather than seekers of truth. In addition, economics also seems to suffer from misplaced scientism. I am not being anti-scientific here. Rather, I am criticising the tendency to imagine that society can be reduced to a set of tidy mathematical equations, physics envy as it’s popularly know. Misplaced scientism and the manner in which economics has become synonymous with capitalism are, in my opinion, symptomatic of underlying epistemological problems within economics. But that’s a discussion for later. Let us end this post by considering Myrdal’s reasons for the title of his book, Asian Drama.

Myrdal says that the title of the book is based on the idea that a kind of drama was playing out in post-colonial South Asia and despite the complexities and dissimilarities amongst the different nations of South Asia there was a clear-cut set of conflicts and a common theme, as in any drama. Outsiders who provided research, financial aid and other means of support were actors in the drama too, but the final outcome was largely in the hands of the people of South Asia. They would have to solve the conflicts between their aspirations and the disappointment of dealing with a harsh reality and between the desire for change and improvement and their anxieties and inhibitions about accepting the consequences and paying the price in terms of the abandonment of old ways and values. One could say that a similar drama is playing out in Africa and here too the final outcome is largely in the hands of the people of Africa. Hopefully, we’ll prove the afro-pessimists wrong.

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