Africa from the

1970s to the Recent Past

Lecture 5
Module 5
Lecture outline
• Economic challenges and rising poverty (1970s – 2000)
• Africa Rising? (2000s)
The previous three lectures focused on the immediate post-independence
period and some of the challenges of forming new nation-states in the
wake of colonialism amid Cold War competition

The following slides focus on how African countries structured their

economies after independence.

For the most part, African leaders made few changes to the colonial
economies that they inherited.
African economies since independence
• Economic legacies of colonialism
• Remember --> Colonial economies were organized around cash crop production by peasants
or on plantations, as well as exportation of mined goods that relied on migrant labor
• In most cases, independence did not change this.

• Independent African states inherited economies geared around exports of

commodities, including cash-crops (coffee, cocoa, cotton, etc.) and mined natural
resources (copper, gold, diamonds, etc.)
• During the era of “legitimate commerce” in the 19th century and during colonialism,
production had shifted from food crops to cash crops in most parts of Africa. This meant that
African farmers often bought imported foodstuffs, while they produced cash crops for export.
• Independent African states, like the colonies before them, hoped to generate profits and
state revenue through exporting agricultural and mined resources.
Postcolonial Industrialization (or lack thereof)
• African countries mostly lacked factories for processing their cultivated or mined
commodities into finished products, but Africans were consumers of these finished
products.
• For example, in some West African states like Mali or Benin, people grew cotton for export, but
they did not have many factories to make cloth, so their cotton went to Europe and later they
purchased cotton cloth from abroad. The same can be said for the mined materials that made
electrical components and other goods.

• African producers of commodities had little control over prices that were set by the
world market (and corporations owned by non-Africans, another facet of
‘neocolonialism’).

• There was not much state or private investment in industrialization (building the
factories and plants for processing commodities) across Africa.
• Independent states relied on the high prices of commodity exports to generate state revenue
through tariffs.
In many parts of Africa, people were doing well in the immediate post-
independence period. Commodity prices were high and so farmers,
miners, and capitalists made good profits. Countries were able to tax
exportable commodities and generate enough revenue to do
development projects like build roads and schools or pay state workers.

But things start to change in the 1970s. African economies slipped into
steep decline and Africans started to become poorer, why?
By 1970s deepening economic crisis, why?
• Changing global market / 70s oil shocks
• Collapse of world commodity prices: In the 1970s, the prices of cash crops and
mined natural resources dropped all over the world.
• At the same time, transportation become more expensive during the oil shocks of
1973 and 1979 (when the price of oil skyrocketed)
• These two factors caused a bottoming out of prices for African producers, regular
people (farmers, miners, etc.) suffered a loss of income and African states could not
generate tariff revenue.

• In sum, Africans still exported the same crops and mined resources, but the prices
they got for them fell because the world price fell and because they were more
expensive to ship. But farmers and others still needed to import foodstuffs since they
grew less food. This created a significant trade imbalance where most African
countries spent more on importing food and consumer goods than they got from
exporting crops and mined goods.
1970s economic crisis, continued
• Other postcolonial factors also led to economic crisis and worsening
poverty:
• Rapid population growth/urbanization
• As more people started moving from rural areas (which were becoming poorer as prices
dropped), the state had more internal expenditures to provide infrastructure (roads,
schools, hospitals) for urban dwellers. But they often lacked the capacity to tax
populations and were now making less money through tariffs at the borders.
• Economic mismanagement
• Some African leaders took on debt to finance prestige projects like dams and
monuments, others funneled public monies into their private accounts (corruption).
• Environmental factors (droughts)
The Problem of Debt
• When states could not meet their obligations
to their citizens through revenue brought in
from taxes and tariffs, they started to take out
loans from other states, private banks, or
multilateral organizations. But African states
could not get good terms for loans, because
they were seen as risky investments.
• Often, leaders took out loans to finance large
development projects and the money was
squandered by political elites. But the state (and its
people) still owed it.

• Debt servicing (paying off loans, often with

high interest rates) became a major expense
for many African countries

For example, 30%-40% of the revenue of the Democratic

Republic of the Congo was going to service debt markets in 2003
à
The economic crisis became entrenched in the 1970s and worsened in
the 1980s in many parts of Africa. This sluggish economy continued
until the early 2000s.

Reliance on commodity exports, economic mismanagement, rapid

population shifts, and the problem of debt led to increasing poverty
across most regions of Africa from the 1970s to the 2000s.
Of course, the level and the experience of poverty differed among the
people in a single country and across African countries.
A few African men became extremely wealthy during the 1980s and
1990s.

But the larger trend during the 70s to the 2000s was towards rising
poverty of both individuals and countries.
Let’s explore this through one example: ZAMBIA, a country that, in the
1960s, seemed destined to “develop” and become globally
competitive, but by the 1990s, was one of the world’s poorest.
Example of Zambia • Economy à copper mining
• 1960s to early 70s: Zambia reckoned a “middle
income country” because of wealth from copper
exports. People were doing well (buying cars,
building houses, etc.), cities were growing, the
government had the money to build schools etc.
• 1969: GDP was one of the highest in Africa
• 1970s: Decline in world price of copper and other
commodities
• From 1974 to 1994: Zambian income fell by 50
percent
• By 1991: 68 percent of Zambians unable to meet
“basic needs” of housing and food
• Urban poverty; rural-urban migration started to
reverse, and people move back to the countryside.
• Essentially, Zambia went from an emerging economy
in the 1960s to an incredibly poor underdeveloped
one in the 1990s largely because of their reliance on
a single export (copper) and the drop in its world
price.
In the 1990s, some countries became multiparty democracies, ending
decades of dictatorship.
Why the change?
Democratization in the 1990s
• First generation of African leaders ageing out (dying or retiring)
• Younger people were less interested in and supportive of leaders based on
their anti-colonial credentials.
• Young people had not lived through colonialism and were less impressed by the
records of older dictators who have fought against it and used their anti-colonial
record to bolster support among citizens. Young people had the experience of direct
oppression by African leaders not Europeans.
• Budget cuts and increasing poverty made it difficult for African civilian and
military regimes to maintain patronage systems (they could no longer rally
support among key persons, interest groups, and organizations with money
or jobs).
• The end of Cold War meant less superpower financial and military support
for leaders who could not find support among their own people.
 The first country to democratize in the 1990s was Benin. It had been
run by a dictator named Mathieu Kérékou since 1972. In the 1980s, his
government received Soviet and North Korean support and they were
nominally communist. But the country was getting poorer and regular
people were sick of the state’s mismanagement and waste, so they
organized a National Conference.
 National Conference
• In the former French colonies,
representatives of political factions
gathered to write a new
constitution and organize elections.
• The first was in Benin in 1990
• This would have been unthinkable in
the previous decade due to threats
of state violence, but the state itself
had become inept.
• Free and fair elections happened in
1991, putting the end to a twenty
year dictatorship of Kerekou.
• Mali, Niger, Congo-Brazzaville (1991
– 1992)
 Without the threat of violence against them, people in different parts
of the continent began to organize associations and other forms of civil
society to push for their interests.

Democratization in Africa is an ongoing process and an unstable one.

 In this course, we have encountered several different narratives or
ways of talking about Africa.
For example, Medieval Europeans and Arabs perceived Africa as a land
of gold and riches during the time of Mansa Musa. During the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, outsiders portrayed the
continent as a “Dark Continent” in need of colonizing.

We will finish the course with a brief discussion of a new narrative

about the continent. This new way of talking about Africa emphasizes
positive changes and has gained traction in recent years:
Africa rising
What is Africa
Rising?
New narrative of Africa focused on revived
economy and political stability in 21st century
“The rise seemed obvious: You could simply stroll around Nairobi,
Kenya’s capital, or many other African capitals, and behold new
shopping malls, new hotels, new solar-powered streetlights, sometimes
even new Domino’s pizzerias, all buoyed by what appeared to be high
economic growth rates sweeping the continent.
For so long Africa had been associated with despair and doom, and
now the quality of life for many Africans was improving. Hundreds of
thousands of Rwandans were getting clean water for the first time. In
Kenya, enrollment in public universities more than doubled from 2007
to 2012. In many countries, life expectancy was increasing, infant
mortality decreasing…”

• Jeffrey Gettleman, “Africa Rising? Africa Reeling May Be a More Fitting Slogan These Days,”
New York Times, Oct 18 2016.
Africa rising
• From 2000 to 2015, most African economies grew à 5% per year

• Why?
• Political stability
• Democratization meant people could change leaders through elections instead of coup d’état
• Economic development
• Why? à because of SAPs or despite SAPs? – this is a question for future historians!
• Debt relief
• Some of the debt of individual African countries forgiven by multilateral organizations
• New technologies
• Cell phones and the internet facilitated business and civil society
• New generation of leaders
• Leaders with anti-colonial credentials no longer relevant, dying, or retiring, which created
new opportunities for young leaders
Whether “Africa rising” proves to be a good way of thinking about or
understanding the current historical moment in Africa will be up to
future historians to decide…