Africonomics: A History of Western Ignorance

The West does not understand African economics. In a fearless, funny polemic, a historian exposes the blinkered assumptions of centuries of Western interventions on the continent.

We need to think differently about African economics. Here’s how.

For centuries, Westerners have tried to ‘fix’ African economies. From the abolition of slavery onwards, missionaries, philanthropists, development economists and NGOs have arrived on the continent, full of good intentions and bad ideas. Their experiments have invariably gone awry, to the great confusion of all involved.

In Africonomics, historian Bronwen Everill argues that these interventions fail because they start from a misguided and often racist premise: that African economies just need to be more like the West. Ignoring the vast differences between different African nations, Europeans and Americans assumed a set of universal economic laws that could be applied everywhere. They enforced specifically Western ideas about growth, wealth, debt, unemployment, inflation, women’s work and more, and used Western metrics and models to find African countries wanting.

The West, fundamentally, does not know better than African nations how any economy should be run. We need to abandon our old assumptions and outdated ideas. We need a new story about money in Africa.