Despite having ‘everything necessary to become a powerful, modern, industrialised continent’, in the words of former Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah, the African continent has been plagued by Western intervention in the form of coups, structural adjustment programmes, and more. While African leaders such as Nkrumah have sought to establish new development frameworks based on the organisation of an autonomous united Africa, these Western-imposed agendas have severely hindered the continent’s aspirations for development and dignity. Today, with the rise of China’s Belt and Road Initiative following its own rapid development independent of Western institutions, China represents an important source of financing for alternative development projects.
The problem of industrialising was always organisational, in Europe just as much as Africa. If the rest of the world disappeared it would naturally develop over probably a couple centuries, since the process has started. The question for developing nations today is how to do it faster than that.
Some countries have demonstrated how it can be done much faster than Europe and the US did it.
Yep. I’m not sure about Meiji Japan, but both the tiger economies and the Soviets did it by building on the existing European industrial economies. In the tiger’s case, they bought easy to operate industrial machinery and ran it with cheap domestic labour for profitable export back to advanced economies, in Stalin’s case he hired American contractors to build and train replica American factories in the USSR. After that, they could take the new resources and institutional experience and use it to build up to a next step.