The Abandonment of Africa
23 April 2025
In the decade or two that followed WWII, it seemed as if Africa was coming into its own in the world. Local economies were partaking in the global post-war boom. The old empires were on their last legs. Independence was in the air everywhere in Africa just as it was in Asia and the Middle East. In the numerous African territories that were still part of the British Empire, this trend was particularly evident. They had by and large enjoyed more economic development than their non-British African counterparts. Now, Britain looked favorably on admitting them to the British Commonwealth as independent states. A new generation of African leaders stepped forward to make a name for themselves, their countries, and their continent: Julius Nyerere in Tanzania, Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, Hastings Banda in Malawi, Kenneth Kaunda in Zambia, Jomo Kenyatta in Kenya, and others.
While Ian Smith of Rhodesia is not usually included in such lists of ambitious post-war African leaders, there is no question that Rhodesia, too, sought independence from Britain during this period, just as other African countries did. It is often suggested that Smith and other white Rhodesians of his generation sought independence only for the purpose of avoiding black majority rule. However, earlier Rhodesian prime ministers going back to WWII: Godfrey Huggins, Roy Welensky, Edgar Whitehead, and Winston Field, all agitated for independence in increasingly vocal terms before majority rule became the sticking point for the British. Smith believed in Africa, much like the black African leaders of his generation. He saw Africa as the future, his future, and saw his country, as they saw theirs, as leading the best way forward.
In addition to being the odd man out because he was white, he was also, like Rudyard Kipling, a foreign-born Englishman who saw himself as having a thoroughly grounded familiarity and understanding of the people and culture of the land of his birth. He was proud of the achievements of the English in Africa and clearly he thought the Rhodesian model exemplified the best possible future for the continent, avoiding both the one-party state approach adopted by all the aforementioned black leaders and the Apartheid model of South Africa. He thought any objective observer should see the advantages of Rhodesia already manifest, with its best years yet to come. He saw the National Party of South Africa as fighting a hopeless rear-guard action to preserve ancient privileges, while Rhodesia participated in the hopeful competition of who could best advance Africa’s destiny.
Africa is roughly 20% of the world’s land mass and 20% of world population. It is rich in natural resources, excellent farmland, breathtaking natural wonders, diverse wildlife, tourist opportunities, and desirable climate. It has many natural warm water ports and few obstacles to the construction of railroads. Until the late 20th century, it was assumed that Africa played an important role in the world.
European expeditions to Africa had served many purposes from the acquisition of slaves to missionary work. In the 19th century, many were focused on making a quick profit through the wholesale acquisition and export of ivory, gold, or diamonds. Treatment of Africans was often bloody and exploitative, the rubber plantations in the Belgian Congo being a particular horrific instance. But by the early 20th century, these kinds of practices were on their way out, even in the Congo. Investment across Africa was becoming longer-term and focused on broadening local economies. The colony of Southern Rhodesia established Gonarezhou National Park in 1936 to preserve game animals. New wealth creation, infrastructure, and improved access to medicine and education led to rapid increases in native populations. Many Africans started businesses. African workers joined labor unions. By WWII and little noticed at the time, a black middle class was emerging.
Every empire had an Africa policy and serious at-risk investments there. At the time, none of this was done out of charity. In the movie Mary Poppins, set just before WWI, Mr. Dawes the banker attempts to convince young Michael Banks to invest his precious tuppence in “railroads in Africa!” This was considered at the time both an exciting investment and a profitable one.
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Today, all developed countries still spend billions each year on aid to Africa, but no one even pretends anything will come out of it. It is done to show how moral we are. And yet we know much of that money is used to further immoral ends. In the early 1990s, there was occasional talk about reforming the aid programs so that not everything went to enriching and ensconcing dictators, but after the Battle of Mogadishu in 1993, interest in such reform all but died.
Africa is now neither profitable nor even interesting. The last event in Africa to attract much attention elsewhere was the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. The Darfur genocide and the Boko Haram killings and kidnappings of the early 21st century merited little more than Twitter hashtags, and the many bloody civil wars in the Congo, Angola, and Mozambique, which have killed millions of people, have gone almost completely unnoticed outside the continent.
Even “emerging markets” funds are almost entirely invested in East Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, and Eastern Europe. You will occasionally see half of a percent or less of such a fund invested in the Republic of South Africa, but nowhere else in sub-Saharan Africa.
What happened? Africa’s troubles are often blamed on colonization and the white man. Yet Africa’s economies where flourishing during the colonial era when there were far more white people living in Africa than there are today. Even in terms of political repression and instability, it would be hard to argue that things were worse then than the unending civil wars, large scale genocides, and soul-crushing corruption, crime, poverty, and hopelessness of the last fifty years. And it is South Africa — the country colonized the earliest and the longest and the only country in the region that still has a sizable white population today — that is Africa’s last best hope, if only by comparison.
But it would be a mistake to view the downfall of Africa in racial terms. Black immigrants to the United States from Africa and the Caribbean perform better in terms of educational and financial achievement compared to the native-born U.S. population of all races. The even greater danger is to think that the West, even if it remains majority white, is somehow immune from suffering the fate of Africa. The same policies that destroyed Africa can destroy all of us and for the same reasons.
The change in thinking among Western ruling classes in the late 20th century is something of a resurrection of the aristocratic disdain for the profit motive and a desire to see the mass of humanity living as penniless peasants on the aristocrats’ estates. It is an inherently destructive worldview harbored by unproductive people and based on resentment of human ingenuity. The profit motive indicates a faith in the future of the human race. The only conditions that westerners place on their largesse now are environmentalist in nature. The recipients must not use the funds to develop their own economies. The west is in fact paying for human nature reserves where the ruling cliques prey on the peasantry just as lions prey on gazelles.
Africa is now a dead end, best kept in check by western-financed strong men. But eventually, the dictators fail, as they have in Somalia, leaving their countries destitute and lawless craters pumping out millions of despairing refugees. It is as if these countries had been hit by a massive earthquake or tsunami or nuclear bomb. Yet there was no earthquake or tsunami or bomb, just bad policy, policy supported and financed by western countries, the UN, and the World Bank for decades after colonization ended. And in the end none of this was done for profit; the dictators were never profitable. It was simply the decision that large swaths of the globe and the people living there didn’t matter, weren’t really human at all.
And this is increasingly how these same policymakers regard increasing swaths of their own populations in the western countries, whether in the amorphous “inner city” or undifferentiated “flyover country.” Hundred of millions of people are being written off, reduced to dysfunction, denied effective representation and speech, and put on a terminal drip of stimulus payments or universal basic income and semi-legalized narcotics, with a blind eye turned to wanton violence.
The realization of this vision has been in the making for some time. In the 1972 movie The Candidate, the Robert Redford character says: “We subsidize machines, why not subsidize people?” as if this is the height of wisdom, compassion, and deep insight. Yet neither the character played by Redford nor Jeremy Larner, who wrote the script, seem to realize that they are equating people with machines. And not only that, but they are equating people to unprofitable machines. And subsidizing unprofitable machines is itself bad policy.
This is all, as an environmentalist might put it, unsustainable. Who will provide the West with foreign aid when no one will buy our bonds anymore? Where will we flee to when our own states fail and finally collapse?