The Volatile Perceptions and Experiences of the Black World: Seven

Swings, Five Crises and Five Aspiring Hegemons since 1500

Abel B.S. Gaiya

There is a stubborn tendency to focus on African development economics from the postcolonial period, with
analyses of African countries’ economic growth often starting off with “X gained independence from Y in
nineteen sixty-Z”. Within that framework, the debt crisis of the 1980s represents the first generalized
economic crisis faced by African countries. Likewise, the confidence that African nations would soar, and that
a great black nation would rise to drive the global black agenda often begins with Ghana as the first 20th
century postcolonial state, and then Nigeria as the world’s most populous black state. Finally, the history of
assurance that the black race is self-governmentally powerful often begins from either the postcolonial period
or the abolitionist period of the late 18th century. All three cases, however, present very incomplete histories
and the fact that confidence in the black world has often alternated since the early modern era.

First, before the generalized economic crisis of the 1980s, there was the 1930s generalized economic crisis
which spurred greater calls for “colonial development” through some degree of industrialization (Butler,
1997). Before the 1930s crisis there was that of 1873-1896 which spurred greater calls and action for “colonial
development” through railway construction to unlock legitimate trade (Ọmọsini, 1971). Before that, there was
post-abolition economic crises of the early 1800s experienced by some African states; and before that there
was the long African economic crisis of 1650s-1800s of some Western African regions which suffered the
most from continuous external slave raids and internal ruling class predation. All of these were due to
commodities exports (with the first and longest crisis on the list involving human commodities). Therefore, as
Morten Jerven (2016) argues, it does not make sense to talk about an “African growth tragedy”, but rather an
“African growth recurrence”. In addition, while world GDP per capita grew by 216% between 1820 and
1950, that of Africa grew only by 111% (Jerven, 2016: 133). So some growth occurred, but in episodes and
with significant geographical unevenness.

Second, belief in a great black nation which would push the global agenda for a world that is secure for the
black race or African continent first arose when, in 1791, Haiti underwent the world’s first successful mass
slave uprising in history. However, the internal and external constraints it faced limited the realization of its
potential. Over the next 200 years, Liberia, Ethiopia, Black America, Ghana and Nigeria each became the
bastion of black geopolitical potential, yet without success in each case. Moreover, all visions and attempts by
African and black nations to industrialize, from the earliest attempts by the Imerina Empire in the 1820s,
Liberia’s James Payne and West Indian Martin Delany in the 1850s, to Ghana, Nigeria, Ethiopia and Jamaica
in the 19th and 20th centuries, have failed.

Third, belief in the value and capabilities of the black race was stable in the pre-Atlantic period – although
slightly lower during the medieval trans-Saharan, Indian Ocean and Red Sea slave trades, at least for black
lands beyond Ghana, Mali and Songhai –, dipped to its lowest point during the trans-Atlantic slave trade
(Davidson, 1961), improved from the late 18th century during the abolitionist period, declined again by the
middle of the 19th century, and improved during the decolonization and postcolonial period, only to decline

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again in the 1980s and 1990s. In the most recent incarnation, the continent was branded as a “hopeless
continent” facing “permanent crisis”. Reversal occurred again, albeit with mixed emotions, in the first
decades of the 21st century with an “Africa rising” narrative.

Keeping these three 500-year trends in mind forces the black world and its allies to realize that innovative and
transformative are sorely needed to escape the domestic, international and natural structural trappings of the
modern world. It also calls for somberness whenever new fads – such as Ethiopianism, the prospects of
Afro-American aid through Garveyism, Nigeria as the “giant of Africa”, or the contemporary look towards
Afro-American emigration into Ghana – emerge that promise to be the salvation of the African continent or
the black world. Based on these past trends, and given the existential crisis faced with climate change – which
Africa is the continent most vulnerable to –, it would only be consistent if this pattern of recurring cycles of
hope and disappointment continue over the next century.

Before the Atlantic Encounter

Africa was involved in the “first global economy” which was situated within the Indian Ocean World long
before its substantive involvement in the Atlantic global trade, stretching as far east as China to as far west as
West Africa. The East African coast and North Africa were important regions in this Indian Ocean trade
which emerged around the 800s CE till the late 1800s (therefore preceding the European-based “first wave of
globalization” of 1850-1914). Although between 1500 and 1800, cotton textiles were the most global among
the commodities entering long distance trade (Riello and Roy, 2009: 9), and although Indian textiles were the
most dominant among these textiles, the absence of an Indian industrial revolution meant that local
economies could maintain both local handicraft production, subsistence agriculture and could less
disruptively export intra-regionally and globally while importing from abroad. In fact in West Africa, the
dominant import goods even as late as 1661 were not manufacturing goods (Inikori, 2009), but rather
currency materials (cowries, shells, and clothing strips) used to foster the rising intra-regional trade (such as
Igbo, Benin and Allada exports of cloths to Asante). Another major import was a raw material – iron rods,
used for metalworking. Textiles came in third, and little to no European firearms were imported at this time,
indicating relative peace and rising regional integration and prospective proto-industrialization in the region.
Note that European trade with Africa did not start out as parasitic as it subsequently did, as European
merchants actually reinforced the pre-existing productive African patterns of trade in the 1500s, until the rise
in American slave demand from the 1650s negatively altered this pattern.

The First African Economic Crisis

The first economic crisis, concentrated in West and West Central Africa, came with the substantial rise in
demand for slaves between 1650 and 1810. The effects were a reversal of the deepening of intra-regional
trade; substantial depopulation and intensification of labour shortage on a continent that was already labour-
scarce to begin with; disruption of nascent proto-industrialization; and geopolitical instability. Currency
imports into West Africa declined in absolute terms, and the dominant imports became manufactured goods
– firearms, signalling an increase in warfare, and textiles –, as slaves became the dominant export. Centralized
states dependent on slave exports emerged, such as Dahomey, Kongo and the Merina Empire, but these had
predatory and parasitic relationships with hinterland polities. Eventually, even the Kongo Kingdom, the most
powerful state in West Central Africa, collapsed. This was Africa’s most devastating modern economic crisis.
On a continent with a significant scarcity of labour, population growth between the late 17 th century and the

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19th century was very low. The impacts of the Atlantic slave trade has lasting effects till today, in Africa’s
institutions, social trust, intra-regional trade, and so on. This occurred because the price of slaves, a fictitious
commodity, surged due to demand from the Americas.

The Second African Economic Crisis

Africa’s second economic crisis, focused on West Africa, occurred following the abolition of the slave
trade by the hitherto largest slave trading empire on earth in 1807, and the subsequent efforts at enforcement
of this ban. Many West African states whose exports and state revenues had come to depend largely on the
slave trade saw their revenues fall, thereby experiencing what Anthony Hopkins (1973) called a “crisis of
adaptation”. This crisis contributed to collapse of the hitherto most powerful state in Southern Nigeria, the
Oyo Empire, in the 1820s. In Dahomey fiscal and political instability occurred in the 1850s (Law, 1997).
Zanzibar in East Africa, which had been the centre of slave exports in the region, also faced a crisis when the
British intensified pressure for abolition in the 1870s, and this necessitated the intensification of agricultural
production. The Merina Empire in Madagascar, Southern Africa, faced such an economic and fiscal crisis in
the 1820s which sparked its policy of proto-industrialization. There was therefore a need to develop
“legitimate commerce” and undergo a “commercial transition” by developing cash crops. In general, peasant
production did increase, and many societies were able to reorient their external trade accordingly. However,
this century was also a period of deindustrialization of handicrafts and artisanal industries, as British and
European manufactured goods expanded across the world market, while among the global periphery a “great
specialization” in raw materials production occurred. This was aided by powerful “Dutch Disease forces”
(O’Rourke and Williamson, 2017: 7) as the relative price of commodities soared up to the 1890s
(Williamson, 2011).

The Third African Economic Crisis

However, that secular boom turned into a secular bust during the 1873-1896 world economic downturn,
sparking off the third African economic crisis. Foreign trade and commerce in Liberia suffered (Akpan,
1975), Egypt fell into over-indebtedness and a fiscal crisis, and had to default on its loans in the 1870s.
Zanzibar, which had gone through a “clove mania” after establishing clove plantations following the abolition
of the slave trade and pressures to curb exports. This economic crisis contributed to the colonial Scramble for
Africa in the 1880s (Hopkins, 1995).

The Fourth African Economic Crisis

The fourth African economic crisis occurred as a result of the Great Depression (1929-1936) during which
world commodities prices crashed, although there was also a brief postwar depression of 1920-1921. Many
African governments, now under colonial rule, experienced fiscal and economic downturns. It was during this
period that colonial authorities in West Africa even made various proposals to the British Colonial Office to
expand financial transfers and encourage some industrial development, acknowledging colonial Africa’s
vulnerability to fluctuating demand for their exports. Such efforts were, however, mostly rebuffed by the
Treasury, Board of Trade and Cotton Board. South Africa in 1924 launched its industrialization policy
(following the fall in gold prices), followed closely by Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe (following the fall
in copper prices). The depression also, as Ayodeji Olukoju states, “finally doomed colonial-era indigenous
commercial enterprises” in Africa.

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Although decolonization during the 1960s had given African states greater policy autonomy to carry out
industrial policy in pursuit of industrial development, the distortion of African political settlements and
limited human capital and entrepreneurial promotion under colonial rule had limited the size of the African
capitalist class, and prevented compensating state-owned enterprises from functioning under suitable
conditions of developmental governance and developmental clientelism. In addition, Africa still suffered
labour scarcity, which made labour less competitive than East and South East Asian countries, thereby
limiting the path of labour-intensive industrialization.

Therefore, although there was more industrial growth in post-colonial Africa than there was under colonial
rule, this was much less than occurred in East Asia where both under Japanese colonization (which
strengthened both the Korean political settlement and industry) and after colonization (with substantial
foreign aid support from the U.S.). Commodities exports still predominated. For Nigeria, the largest state on
the continent, commodities dependence was even worsened by the growth of oil exports, which intensified
the Dutch Disease.

The Fifth African Economic Crisis

As a result, this “Golden Age of Development” for Africa ended in the 1980s. The African debt and
economic crisis was actually the fifth African economic crisis since the continent’s integration at the lower
rungs of the West European-led global mercantile and capitalist system (after previously occupying middle
rankings in global power, economics and technology). Mkandawire (__) calls it the “Great African
Depression”. The literature on this episode is vast and well known, since it was the most recent one, and
since economists have tended to “compress” African history by often starting from the postcolonial period in
their analyses. Moreover, the African economic experiments and industrialization attempts only had 20 years
from 1960s to 1980 to run their course, after which the world economic crisis reversed the “embedded
liberal” international order which permitted countries to make use of industrial policy to reduce their external
vulnerability. With the 1990s being a “lost decade” of development, Africa entered the 21 st century with
another growth episode still based upon commodities production, fueled significantly by emerging market
demand, most importantly the Chinese. We therefore await the sixth African economic crisis.

Egypt, as Guang Pan notes, “became the first country in the Asian-African region to embark on the road of
modernization in the early 19th century”. This began decades before Japan made such an attempt in 1868
following its Meiji Restoration. However, Japan ended up being the first non-European country to
industrialize, and from whose industrial emergence precipitated expansion of industrial capabilities to the rest
of East Asia. Egypt was not the only African country to attempt industrial development in the 1800s. Tunisia
in the 1860s, Ethiopia from the 1850s and the Merina Empire (in Madagascar) from the 1820s were three
other states that made attempts, although others like Zanzibar (1870s), Liberia (1860s), Asante (1870s) made
smaller-scale attempts at modernization. These were all states that faced the ‘whip of external necessity’ (as
Leon Trotsky put it), realizing the need to modernize in order to defend against European and other threats,
or to make economic gains. Yet these failed for various structural reasons.

The Challenge of the Future

Although the sixth African economic crisis is sure to come given the continued commodities dependence,
structural changes between the immediate postcolonial and present period indicate that the next crisis might
spark better results from industrialization attempts. Unlike the postcolonial period in which there was no

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substantive capitalist class to lobby for policy and favourable development policy, a new class of African
capitalists have emerged, especially since the 2000s, that the phenomenon has been given the name “Afri-
capitalism”. In addition, although African political settlements are still largely characterized by “competitive
clientelism” across ethnic, religious and political lines which makes developmental governance difficult to
achieve, this is less unstable than it was during the 1960s to 1990s when political and military elites and ethnic
groups fought out to establish supremacy and exclude competing social groups amid a very small middle class
and private business sector. Hence there is evidence that “as the colonial period is slowly fading, the influence
of precolonial political institutions on modern state capacity is reasserting itself”. 21st century African political
settlements, learning the lessons of the immediate postcolonial decades, have less non-inclusive power-
sharing arrangements, although there is still a long way to go and potential for a renewed generalized political
instability. The labour scarcity which plagued the continent (for instance, Africa’s population density only
reached Europe’s 1500 level in 1975, and the continent’s 1850 population was only 100 million, roughly
equivalent to the population of Kenya and Tanzania combined) has given way to labour abundance, creating a
comparative advantage in labor-intensive industrialization. There is also potential for increased manufacturing
FDI from East Asia. Given these factors, it would not be surprising to see, amidst the turbulence of the sixth
African economic crisis, more concerted efforts at industrial policy, and with greater success (or at least with a
higher average manufacturing share of GDP despite an interregnum), as is incipiently observed in Ethiopia,
Rwanda and Botswana today. It is thus reasonable to agree that “while ‘unconditional convergence’ in
manufacturing output growth remains a dream, the conditions for achieving it are better at present than they
were in the late nineteenth century, or even at the time when most African countries achieved independence
from colonial rule (c.1960).”

Such efforts must at the same time include innovations towards the fourth industrial revolution and
participation in the drive to invest in low carbon and climate resilience technologies. The continent must
prepare for the challenges of climate change, automation, the intensification of regressive and progressive
counter-movements against neoliberal capitalism (which could, for Africa, also include demands on
altering/decolonizing the African state system), magnified hegemonic contestation, and eventual increased
supranational governance based upon Eurasian dominance. Africa will be seeking to face such challenges
while facing challenges to the capitalist system itself, and will therefore also need to more seriously explore
multi-structural solutions – that is, those fusing capitalist and other forms of economic organization. The
world has gone through the first fifth of the 21st century, and has experienced significant events – the Global
Financial Crisis of 2008/2009 (which did not result in a depression because of massive monetary expansion,
resulting in narrower monetary space for the hegemon to face a next crisis), the limited emergence of populist
movements, the COVID-19 pandemic (which threatens to induce a depression), hegemonic trade wars
between the U.S. and China, and more frequent climate change-related phenomena. The rest of the century
will be highly “eventful”.

Conclusion

In other words, what I am arguing for is a neo-Blydenian, neo-Delanyian, quasi-Garveyite and quasi-
Padmorian approach to global black politics and economics. It is neo-Blydenian because it

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References

Ọmọsini, Olufẹmi (1971). Railway Projects and British Attitude towards the Development of West Africa,
1872-1903. Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria, 5(4): 491-507.