Is development merely a bunch of social and economic indicators? Glancing at the 2009 Millennium Development Goals progress report, you will get the impression that it is. In recent years, however, there is a re-opening of the intellectual debate on the "cultural" component of development. One basic premise is that without looking at a society's culture, history and values, one can never understand its processes of social interaction and formulate effective development policies.
Culture is a term which means different things to different people. Without getting into definitions, I illustrate with two observations made by Professor Chen Zhiwu, an economist at Yale University, who made a field trip to Africa last month and blogged about his experiences.
The first example concerns the culture of entrepreneurship. In a conversation with a Uganda UN official, they discussed why Africans lack the spirit of innovation and entrepreneurship. The official said that that the tradition of tribalism discourages innovation. If an endeavor is successful, it will be shared among the tribe; if not, consequences of failure have to be borne by the individual. In Uganda, over half of the individuals belong to tribes. Regardless of consanguinity, everyone is treated equally as brothers and sisters. While this sounds great, it is detrimental to the development of business enterprises.
The second example concerns HIV/AIDS. According to the 2009 MDG progress report, sub-Sahara Africa is home to 67% of those living with HIV. As the report admits, "social and cultural norms, practices, beliefs and laws can [...] reinforce the relative powerlessness of young women, and their susceptibility to HIV infection." Professor Chen observes the prevalence of tribal structures in Africa means that traditional family values (like those of China) are weak. Husbands and wives are "publicly owned." Therefore, the practices of polygamy and casual sexual relationship are very common, with the result that HIV is getting out of control. Certainly, these are deeply-rooted culture which cannot be changed overnight. South African president Jacob Zuma has defended polygamy publicly during the 2010 World Economic Forum in January.
While it is not the intention here to offer policy suggestions, any economic development initiatives should never disregard the role of culture. As Ifeyinwa Annastasia Mbakogu (PhD) of the University of Ibadan in Nigeria writes:
A search for and protection of our cultural heritage is the start point of any meaningful attempt at African cultural liberation and development. An African development that should begin with an identification of Africa’s condition as well as solutions for correcting these conditions, formulated by Africans for Africans. It must also be enunciated that for as long as Africans remain armchair recipients of western cultures, without learning to do things targeted at their awakening, the development challenge will persistently remain an illusion.
I have not seen much literature (then again, I haven’t looked for it either…) or even news on “what it is like” in the minds of people in… say South Africa.
But I have a feeling the whole world has been beating around the bush. Perhaps this blogging platform should have targeted African bloggers & recruited activists from within that part of the world.
Or perhaps some blogger can start putting out some articles. Say, I just encountered Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard address of 1978, and that was pretty powerful. Isn’t there a Solzhenitsyn of Africa?
Very interesting angle and topic Andy.
Two points, first, how the measurements are done of social/economic development need to also take into account other intangibles. Socially, many African families take pride in being close knit families, eating together and family discipline that stops children going down the wayside. In general, this produces children who have respect for elders and other members of the community, but there is no way of measuring this.
Secondly, for innovation, very interesting what the Ugandan official said. For individuals to innovate, they need an environment to do this, such as financial backing and incentives, a clear use for it etc. In general, there isn’t that much financial capacity for innovation to take place on the scale seen in the developed world yet. However there are examples where innovation in Africa has helped development, there is the M-Pesa money transfer scheme in Kenya, the example of William Kwamkwamba in Malawi who built a windmill from scratch that transformed his village by pumping water and producing electricty, shows that innovation is there and it makes a big difference in parts.
Hello Andy,
Your article brought back many experiences. Thanks.
To first come back to the Ugandan UN official. I totally agree with him. Every succeeding individual in Africa is expected to share the rewards (=money) with others. The more success, the more sharing. This eventually discourages a lot of entrepeneurs of being pro-active. But there is another very important factor not mentioned by the official and that is ‘jealousy’. As long as everybody within a group is more or less equal, everything is fine. But if an individual becomes financially succesfull, the rest of the group will hate him for it, although they all want to have a share of the money. Very often this results in the isolation of the succesfull person and discourages this individual from ‘sticking his/her head out’.
Secondly, I don’t entirely agree with Prof. Chen that men and women in Africa are publicly owned. That would mean that everybody owns everybody. How does that work? Polygamy is also something that does not occur all over Africa and together with casual sex, polygamy is not debit to the spreading of HIV. That is the fact that -especially African- men don’t feel MAN if they use condoms.
I think you are making a good point by bringing in the link between culture and development Andy. There are micro-financing opportunities given to citizens of some African countries but it’s true that people need to have that certain type of education which allows them to take initiative and responsibility to succeed.
Your post also brought back some memories from a very short trip I had in Nigeria last year. I remember the discussion I had with an American friend working there who was very surprised about how ierarchized the Nigerian society seems to be and how humble employees are in front of their superiors. I believe this is not the best environment for one to achieve something in their work, especially if they work for the fear not to be grounded by their superiors than for the will to achieve something in their jobs.
I also remember one day a Nigerian man working as a driver for a Western company in Lagos couldn’t come to work at 5.00 am, when his shift was starting, because his tribal leader had passed away and the members of the tribe were not allowed to leave their houses before the sunrise. They could have been killed if they had tried to go against this tribal rule.
The problem is that we tend to apply Western concepts for achieving, success and entrepreneurship to cultures who have very different values than the Westerners. Maybe that’s one of the reasons development efforts don’t seem to be successful at the moment.
Thanks everyone for the comments.
@Carmen: Very interesting experiences, and I think it is these sorts of details which need to be better understood and taken into consideration when formulating policies. When I ponder why Northeast Asian (China, South Korea, Taiwan, etc.) and Southeast Asian countries have done better than Africa over the past few decades in economic development, I believe social norms and culture values do play an important role.
@Johan: Richard Wilkinson’s book, The Spirit Level, basically says that relative inequality, not absolute poverty, is the source of society’s ills. I’m not sure if Africa’s social fabrics of tribalism is a blessing or not. I would expect this will lead to a more equal society, but looking at the Gini coefficient of most African countries, this does not seem to be the case.
@ Andy - I think part of the problem is that any discussion of cultural differences gets subsumed in political correctness and accusations of racism. There is this effort to prove that everyone is exactly the same regardless of background.
@ Carmen - I think you make a good point about how we judge success by western standards. While clearly it’s unacceptable if people don’t have access to food or water, how many people live in big houses and drive cars shouldn’t be considered markers of a country’s success. Striving for every more, ever more things isn’t the route to happiness.
Hi Andy, this is an issue I’m really thinking about a lot these days, particularly since I’m writing my dissertation about the lessons Africa wants to learn from China’s development experience. China’s (and, to a lesser extent, India’s) recent successes seem to be reopening this important debate. Geography also seems to be important: one theory, for example, argues that Africa’s low population density and large, flat open spaces have historically discouraged the kind of large-scale warfare, industrialization and urbanization witnessed in other parts of the world.
Let’s say social norms and traditional practices can affect economic development of a society. In China, frugality and prudence (due to traditional Confucian practices or perhaps lack of social safety nets) explains why domestic savings are high. Different attitudes to human rights (shaped by social structures evolved over the centuries) also have economic implications, for example on how seriously labour regulations and rights are treated. That might explain why China becomes the “factory of the world”.
On the other hand, I also wanted to add that the relationship can work the other way around as well. The Western notion of human rights, for example, is perhaps partially rooted in Englightenment thinking, Christianity, etc. But a large part of it is a reaction to the gross injustices of the industrial revolution, when labour standards were worse than they are in China today - they were developed to protect people from the worst abuses of capitalism and the growing power of the state. So culture and development can each impact each other.
What Elsje said about the role of geography (if I remember correctly from my studies it is called “geographic determinism”), reminded me of a theory popular among Western tibetologysts at the beginning of 20th century. According to it Tibet, due to its vast, uninhabited spaces and high altitudes was exceptionally susceptible to spiritualism. Believe or not, but where excessive spiritualism led Tibet, we all know…