Posts Tagged ‘Africa’
“It’s a matter of perspective”*…
A map’s most basic assumption is a question of orientation (or persective, if you will). For most of us, “up” on a map is north… but it needn’t be– and in Australia, it often isn’t…
Perhaps more impactfully, there’s another matter of perspective: the question of a map’s projection (of areas on a sphere onto a plane). A couple of years ago, (R)D featured The True Size (source of the image at the top), which noted that…
It is hard to represent our spherical world on flat piece of paper. Cartographers use something called a “projection” to morph the globe into 2D map. The most popular of these is the Mercator projection.
Every map projection introduces distortion, and each has its own set of problems. One of the most common criticisms of the Mercator map is that it exaggerates the size of countries nearer the poles (US, Russia, Europe), while downplaying the size of those near the equator (the African Continent). On the Mercator projection Greenland appears to be roughly the same size as Africa. In reality, Greenland is 0.8 million sq. miles and Africa is 11.6 million sq. miles, nearly 14 and a half times larger…
Maps are in the news again, and for exactly that reason. As the estimable Frank Jacobs reports in Big Think, The African Union is arguing that the Mercator projection distorts the continent, both in size and global attention…
On a world map in the Mercator projection, Russia appears larger than Africa. In fact, Africa (11.7 million sq mi, 30.4 million km2) is nearly twice as large as Russia (6.6 million sq mi, 17.1 million km2). Africa has finally had enough.
“(Mercator) is the world’s longest misinformation and disinformation campaign, and it just simply has to stop,” Moky Makura, executive director of advocacy group Africa No Filter, told Reuters. The group champions the introduction of the Equal Earth projection, which aims to give Africa its magnitudinal due.
The African Union (AU) — the association bringing together all of Africa’s 55 countries — has joined Correct the Map, a campaign that urges national governments and international organizations such as the UN or the World Bank to replace Mercator with Equal Earth [here]…
… “Maps are not neutral,” Fara Ndiaye, the co-founder of Speak Up Africa, told The Washington Post. “They were never meant to be. They shape how we learn, how we imagine power, how we see ourselves.”
But, as Jacobs notes, the switch could be tricky…
In 1569, Flemish mapmaker Geert De Cremer — known by his Latinized name as Gerardus Mercator — introduced a map projection that revolutionized navigation. Simply put: a straight line on a Mercator map is a straight line at sea.
That’s not as obvious as it might seem. If you flatten a three-dimensional object, such as the Earth, onto a two-dimensional surface, like a map, you’ll inevitably create some distortion.
Mercator’s radical solution was to reduce directional distortion to zero: His projection maintains accurate angles and directions. That so-called conformal map projection made life (a little bit) easier for the ships swarming out all over the world in the Age of Sail.
But that decision came with a trade-off: It grossly inflated the size of land masses closer to the poles…
… traditions are hard to break. Case in point: The AU itself is still using Mercator for some of the maps on its websites. But secondly, and most importantly, maps aren’t about fairness; they’re about function. Despite its advanced age, the Mercator projection has an in-built advantage over most others.
Mercator’s rectangular grid wasn’t just instrumental for 19th-century whaling vessels tracking their prey; it’s just as useful for 21st-century digital cartography. All those straight angles make Mercator the projection of choice for zoomable maps…
Eminently worth reading in full: “Africa wants its true size on the world map,” from @bigthink.com.
See also: “The True Size of Africa” (an inspiration for The True Size)
* popular idiom
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As we scrutinize scale, we might spare a thought for Joseph Nicollet; he died on this date in 1843. A geographer, cartographer, astronomer, and mathematician, he is best known for mapping the Upper Mississippi River basin during the 1830s.
Nicollet’s maps were among the most accurate of the time, correcting errors made by Zebulon Pike, and they provided the basis for all subsequent maps of the American interior. They were also among the first to depict elevation by hachuring and the only maps to use regional Native American placenames.
Nicollet is memorialized in the names of several places in the region he explored, including Nicollet Island, Nicollet Avenue in Minneapolis, Nicollet County, and the city of Nicollet, all located in Minnesota.
“The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”*…
The always-illuminating Adam Tooze on poverty around the world…
In his speech at the 1973 Annual Meetings, World Bank President Robert McNamara coined the term “absolute poverty,” describing it as “a condition of life so degrading as to insult human dignity and yet a condition of life so common as to be the lot of some 40% of the peoples of the developing countries.” He then posed a difficult question: “And are not we who tolerate such poverty, when it is within our power to reduce the number afflicted by it, failing to fulfill the fundamental obligations accepted by civilized [people] since the beginning of time?” This defining speech solidified the Bank’s new goals at that moment: to accelerate economic growth and to reduce poverty.
That was 1973. Half a century later, what a wave of publications the World Bank tell us is that the fight against absolute poverty faces a new and urgent historic challenge.
From the 1990s onwards economic development brought giant progress towards the goal of ending absolute poverty. But that progress stopped ten years ago.
Since 2015, the push to raise the world’s population out of the direst deprivation, has stagnated. As the World Bank authors acknowledge, we are “facing a lost decade in the fight against global poverty”.
Not only has there been little progress since 2015. But the onset of what the World Bank Poverty, Prosperity and Plant Report dubs the “polycrisis”, is putting further progress even further out of reach. As a blog post amplified:
We are facing a series of overlapping and interconnected crises that are impacting lives and livelihoods almost everywhere. The combined effects of slow economic growth, rising conflict and fragility, persistent inequality, and extreme weather-related events have sent shockwaves across the globe. High-income economies are showing signs of resilience, but the outlook for low-income economies and fragile countries remains deeply troubling.
Just a decade ago, we had cause for more optimism. There was significant progress in sustainable development between 1990 and 2015, with more than a billion people lifted out of extreme poverty. This was a monumental achievement, driven primarily by strong economic growth in China and India, and it brought the wealthiest and least-well off economies closer in income levels. Yet, what seemed like a clear path to complete poverty eradication has since faded… global poverty rates have only now gone back down to pre-pandemic levels, with forecasts indicating a trajectory for the coming years that is dismal at best. Almost half the world’s population—around 3.5 billion people—is living on less than $6.85 a day, the poverty line for upper-middle-income countries. At a more extreme level, almost 700 million people are living on less than $2.15 a day, the poverty line for low-income countries. Extreme poverty has become increasingly concentrated in Sub-Saharan Africa or places affected by conflict and fragility…
… Thanks to Asia’s remarkable growth, absolute poverty is no longer a general global condition. It is now concentrated in a belt running across the breadth of West Africa, the Sahel, Central and Eastern Africa and extending up to the Horn of Africa. Across this vast region a rapidly growing population that will soon number more than half a billion, struggle to survive amidst increasingly harsh and unpredictable environmental conditions, more hampered than helped by states that fail to provide even basic infrastructure and services and where as one recent study of Nigeria has shown, inter-communal violence is amplified by environmental shocks.
Conflict, violence and political instability make either public or private action to escape poverty impossible. As the World Bank comments:
The importance of stability for future poverty reduction can be seen from the graph below, prepared for Western and Central Africa. Countries that managed to avoid fragility (Benin, Cabo Verde, Gabon, Ghana, Equatorial Guinea and Senegal) managed to steadily reduce poverty. Relative to countries that are presently fragile, or that moved in and out of fragility, stable countries reduced poverty by an additional 15 to 20 percentage points. Stability, by the way, goes beyond an ability to maintain peace. Macro-fiscal and debt sustainability are equally critical, as Ghana which recently defaulted on its external debt unfortunately shows. Poverty (at $ 2.15) increased from 25% in 2020 to 33% in 2023.
The implication is clear. Future poverty reduction will increasingly be premised on the ability to ensure stability, as stability is a precondition for economic growth and poverty reduction. In a world in which conflict and instability are on the rise, and debt distress is rising, this is a sobering realization and bad news for the global community’s ability to eradicate poverty anytime soon.
It is a long way from the civilizational language espoused by McNamara half a century ago…
Addressing poverty in turbulent times: “Africa & absolute poverty in an era of polycrisis,” from @adam_tooze.
Apposite: “How China Defeated Poverty” (possible paywall)
(Image above: source)
* Franklin D. Roosevelt
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As we seek stability, we might recall that it was (tradition holds) on this date in 1517– All Hallows (All Saints) Eve– that Martin Luther, a priest and scholar in Wittenberg, Germany, upset by what he saw as the excesses and corruption of the Roman Catholic Church (especially the papal practice of taking payments– “indulgences”– for the forgiveness of sins), posted his 95 Theses on the door of Castle Church. Thus began the Protestant Reformation.
(source)
“The good of man must be the end of the science of politics”*…
Democracy is an easy ideal to embrace (at least for most). But the devil’s in the details. Mohamed Kheir Omer and Parselelo Kantai review the history of democracy in post-colonial Africa and wonder if it’s not time to revisit some of those “details”…
The first peaceful transfer of power in post-colonial Africa was in Somalia in 1967 when Abdirashid Ali Sharmarke defeated incumbent President Aden Abdullah Osman Daar. The second would only follow a quarter of a century later, when in November 1991 trade union leader, Frederick Chiluba defeated incumbent Zambian president, Kenneth Kaunda in the country’s first multiparty election since 1972 when single party rule had been introduced.
For Africa’s Big Men, news of Kaunda’s defeat was yet another signal of what threatened to become Africa’s second Wind of Change after the one that had swept away colonial rule and brought them into power at the end of the 1950s. In the streets of the capitals, the people were in revolt. Dakar, Abidjan, Cotonou, Kinshasa, Yaounde, Nairobi, Harare and several others – all rocked by youth demanding the end of single-party rule and the return of pluralism. Having previously only worried about coups sanctioned and financed in Western metropolises, the dawning realisation that they now had to fear popular revolts – both in the street and at the ballot box – suggested, even to the least paranoid of them, that their former patrons were abandoning them.
[Those Cold War-era autocrats had been] agents of the neocolonial system that had guaranteed the expropriation of Africa’s resources since the moment of flag independence; for them, ‘democracy’ was the ultimate betrayal. Since it was their friends in Washington, London and Paris who had won the Cold War, why were they abandoning their faithful clients? Why was a new dispensation being organised without their participation?…
…
African governments were forced into accepting political liberalisation – that is, the re-introduction of opposition parties – as part of a set of conditions on balance of payments support, itself necessitated by the structural adjustment austerity programmes initiated in the mid-1980s following the debt crisis of circa 1982. With the Cold War over, a vernacular of “good governance”, “transparency” and “accountability” became the mediating language of relations between the rich OECD countries and their aid recipients in Africa. In many African countries, the adoption of multiparty democracy was mandated by Western creditors as a precondition for continued assistance.
Democracy, therefore, was more a creature of the market than of popular citizen aspirations. Western media commentators referred to the package of conditional aid as “market democracy”. In many cases across the continent, the original campaigners for pluralism found themselves side-lined in favour of a new set of actors with closer links to Western embassies and who espoused reformist visions in line with neoliberal orthodoxy. In time, it would dawn on even the more radical political actors that unless they toed the new line, they would lose their place on the donor gravy train…
[The authors review the history and offer some observations that point in the direction of moving from an inherited one-size-fits-all democracy towards a set of culturally-specific applications of the democratic principle…]
… Consider the Gada system, a traditional socio-political system practiced by the Oromo people in Ethiopia and parts of northern Kenya. It is a complex form of social organisation that governs the political, social, economic, and religious life of the community. This indigenous institution predates many modern forms of governance and democracy, showcasing elements of direct democracy, checks and balances, and the peaceful transition of power. Leaders are elected through a democratic process which includes term limits. It also includes a legislative assembly and mechanism for conflict resolution. It has been recognised by UNESCO as an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.
A number of countries in Africa such as Rwanda, Senegal, Madagascar, Lesotho and Morocco employ a mixed electoral system, blending elements of proportional representation with majoritarian or plural systems, which highlight the diversity of electoral systems across Africa, with each country tailoring the mixed electoral model to its specific political, social, and historical context.
Somalia currently uses the 4.5 model, based on a power-sharing model among the four major clans, while giving minority clans a half share to improve inclusivity. Some argue the move killed the possibility of a national identity. The system got corrupted, failed to reform and with foreign regional interference, is struggling to perform. These mixed electoral systems offer a means to promote inclusivity and representation while striving for effective governance. However, the specific design and implementation of these systems can significantly impact their effectiveness and the extent to which they achieve these goals.
Other indigenous systems include the philosophy of Ubuntu (consensus building) in Southern Africa where its cultural and philosophical ethos indirectly influences the values foundational to democratic processes in societies where it’s integral to cultural heritage. Its emphasis on inclusivity, communal conflict resolution, collective participation, and ethical conduct shapes the spirit and objectives of governance and elections, impacting not the technical aspects of how votes are cast and counted, but the overarching principles guiding democratic engagement and policymaking.
These traditional models, which often involve direct democracy and community consensus, might offer valuable insights for creating more effective governance structures in Africa.
30 years since electoral democracy was re-introduced, a re-evaluation of election strategies is required – one that considers a mixed approach that incorporates local traditions with modern electoral processes. This approach may better serve the interests of the African populace, addressing the endemic issues of violence, corruption, and inefficacy plaguing the current system.
This would necessitate recognition and legitimation of both systems within African cultural, historical, and political contexts. Key to this approach is engaging a broad spectrum of stakeholders to ensure the model accurately reflects Africa’s diverse societies. Utilising traditional networks for voter education and mobilization can enhance participation and reduce costs. Forming electoral committees composed of both contemporary officials and traditional leaders will ensure the electoral process is transparent, fair, and locally relevant. Incorporating traditional elements into state ceremonies related to elections can also deepen the process’s legitimacy and cultural resonance. Promoting decentralization through local governance structures that combine traditional and elected authority is crucial. Continuous dialogue for model refinement and the necessity of legal and constitutional adjustments to support this hybrid model are essential for its success. Implementing this model demands careful planning, extensive consultation, and phased introduction, aligning it legally and functionally within each country’s governance framework…
Learning from our mistakes: “Africa’s democratic dividend,” from @africaarguments.
While there are lessons here we can apply to more “mature” democracies, we should remember that getting democracy “right,” in the various ways that might be accomplished, across Africa is the primary point. See, for example, “This Will Finish Us” (“How Gulf princes, the safari industry, and conservation groups are displacing the Maasai from the last of their Serengeti homeland”).
* Aristotle
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As we ponder political process, we might recall that it was on this date in 2012 that Puntland inaugurated its constitution, 14 years after declaring itself an autonomous region within the Somalia federation. The constitution established the Puntland Electoral Commission, which has been guiding the region’s gradual shift from a parliament-based vote system to multi-party elections.
“The only people who can fix Africa are talented young Africans. By unlocking and nurturing their creative potential, we can create a step change in Africa’s future.”*…
And there are about to be a great many of those young people… As we exit the Holidays looking forward, our global foci tend to be the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and East Asia. In an updated re-post (the original of which was featured here), the estimable Noah Smith reminds us not to neglect Africa…
Africa has been mostly out of the news in the U.S. these days. But if you think about the rest of this century, and what that’s going to look like, it’s impossible not to think about the world’s second-largest continent. The two reasons, simply put, are 1) population, and 2) poverty. Africa’s fertility rate is shrinking, just like everywhere else, but it started doing so much later. So population momentum is going to make Africa VERY populous by the time it peaks (which some forecasters think will happen at around the end of the century). [See the chart above, taken from this IMF report.]
You’ll notice that these estimates are quite a bit lower than the ones in my first graph in the [original post]. This is because Africa’s fertility rates have been falling a lot more than people expected. But even with these lower estimates, Africa is projected to be absolutely huge by the end of the century. And its fraction of the young population will be far higher still. There will come a time, not too long from now, when countries around the world are clamoring for African migrants instead of trying to keep them out.
The other reason Africa is important is poverty; it’s now clear that Africa will be the last major world region to escape a subsistence standard of living. The question of whether and how it can escape this fate is the subject of the post below. But notice that the flip side of poverty is potential; being poor means you have a lot of room to grow, and by the end of this century, most labor-intensive tasks will probably be done in Africa.
And growth is actually doing well. Despite all the talk of decoupling and the big slowdown in China, and despite the occasional hand-wringing in the Western press, growth in Sub-Saharan Africa has been pretty robust in 2022 and 2023. And that’s projected to continue this year…
…
Just how to jump-start productivity growth in African manufacturing is a difficult question. Should countries make their exchange rates cheaper? Improve infrastructure? Spend more on education and health? Are free trade agreements important here? Do industrial policies and/or export promotion have any role to play? Or does the rise of automation simply mean that countries can’t get rich with labor-intensive manufacturing anymore?
I don’t know. But… the fact that Africa has some productive manufacturers and the fact it has managed to shift more people into factory work are both good signs. And though Asia’s growth boom is still going strong, it can’t last forever, and Africa’s day as the workshop of the world may come soon.
But economists, leaders, policymakers, businesspeople, and international organizations need to be focusing on this challenge more than they are. The fate of humanity in the 21st century and beyond hinges on whether African countries can figure out the riddle of industrialization…
Smith may be over-optimistic… in which case, economic, political, and climate migrants will stream out of Africa. Or, it may be that Africa’s development will follow a new and different social, political, and economic logic (see. e.g., here, here, and here).
In any event, Africa matters absolutely: “All futurism is Afrofuturism,” from @Noahpinion.
See also: Reynaldo Anderson‘s contribution, “In a post-American world order, Africa becomes a power player,” to Politico‘s “The Unpredictable But Entirely Possible Events That Could Throw 2024 Into Turmoil” (all of which are provocative).
If I were not African, I wonder whether it would be clear to me that Africa is a place where the people do not need limp gifts of fish but sturdy fishing rods and fair access to the pond. I wonder whether I would realize that while African nations have a failure of leadership, they also have dynamic people with agency and voices.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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As we devote ourselves to development, we might recall that it was on this date in 1912 (the anniversary of the 1806 Battle of Blaauwberg, as a result of which the British gained sovereignty over the Dutch Cape Colony, which we now know as South Africa) that the African National Congress was founded. Originally known as the South African Native National Congress, it began as a liberation movement, then became a political party. It has governed South Africa since 1994, when the first post-apartheid election resulted in Nelson Mandela‘s election as President of South Africa.
“How Africa’s population evolves, and how the continent’s economies develop, will affect everything people near and far assume about their lives today”*…
In these tumultuous times, there’s a lot of competition for one’s attention: Russia and its aggression? China and it’s ever-more-assertive rise? The tensions within Europe? The divisions within the U.S.? Indeed, as Adam Tooze argues, there’s so much going on that there’s a risk we’ll miss the most fundamentally important long-term dynamic of all…
Once you realize it’s scale, there is no global trend as dramatic today as the revolution in Africa’s demography.
Asia’s return to the center of the world economy dominates the headlines. But in the grand sweep of history that is a rebalancing or restoration not a revolution. Until the 18th century, the Pacific and Indian Oceans were the heart of sophisticated economic activity. That balance was grossly distorted in the “centuries of humiliation” by the rise of the West. Now, thanks to Asian economic growth, the centers of economic activity and population are realigning.
The same cannot be said for Africa. Despite optimism in recent years, the relative lack of economic growth in Africa is well-known. Less well-appreciated is the extraordinary historical novelty of its demographic development.
In 1914 according to the best estimates, Africa’s entire population was 124 million and that includes North Africa. Today it is 1.34 billion. Compared to Africa’s roughly elevenfold increase in population, Asia’s population increased by “only” between 3 and 4 times – China’s merely tripled and India’s increased by 4.5 times. Furthermore, whereas Asia’s population is beginning to stabilize – led by that of India and China – Africa’s population will, barring disasters, reach 2.4 billion by 2050 and will go on growing.
Longer term projections are hazardous, but a world with somewhere between 9 and 11 billion total population and close to 4 billion people living in Africa is what current trends would lead one to expect. That means that by 2100 the African share of global population will likely be between 35 and 40 percent. And in 2100 the population of several African countries – Chad, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, and South Sudan – is likely still to be growing.
That is something new under the sun. It means that in sheer quantitative terms Africa’s story increasingly drives world history…
Read on for a thoughtful unpacking: “Youth Quake. Why African demography should matter to the world,” from @adam_tooze in his newsletter Chartbook— in part a consideration of Youth Quake, by @EdPaiceARI.
See also: “We need to take a closer look at entrepreneurship in Africa,” from @sham_jaff in @whlwnews.
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As we pay attention, we might send dedicated birthday greetings to Joe Slovo; he was born on this date in 1926. A South African citizen from a Jewish-Lithuanian family, Slovo was a delegate to the multiracial Congress of the People of June 1955 which drew up the Freedom Charter. He was imprisoned for six months in 1960, and emerged as a leader of Umkhonto we Sizwe the following year. He lived in exile from 1963 to 1990, conducting operations against the apartheid régime from the United Kingdom, Angola, Mozambique, and Zambia. In 1990 he returned to South Africa, and took part in the negotiations that ended apartheid. He is probably best known for proposing the “sunset clauses” covering the 5 years following a democratic election, including guarantees and concessions to all sides, and for his fierce non-racialist stance. After the elections of 1994, he became Minister for Housing in Nelson Mandela’s government, a post he held until his death from cancer in 1995.
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