Sitting on the left in the adjacent photo is a professor who will tell you that Africa is "under-developed" because "Africans are too content with the little that they have, Africans are not driven, they are good at rejoicing, dancing and singing, but not at pursuing progress." If you try to dispute it, he will respond that you have to be African to understand. In addition he will tell you that under-development in Africa is caused by the jealousy that keeps Africans from uniting to achieve common goals. The professor would add: "if you were to tell Africans that their poverty is due to geography, then they would stop trying." Government functionaries tend to espouse behavioralist explanations and point to the villager mentality. A couple days back a functionary looked at a grapefruit tree full of fruit and said “look how lazy we are [we are too lazy to even create plantations of trees that would provide for us].” Does he have it right or is there more to it like tree diseases, too many short term needs, and the lack of a market for grapefruit?
A man from my village who is living and working abroad came back to Togo for a visit and had little hope for his village. He predicted that "Africa will never develop. Look at all the men sleeping on benches all day who wake up and say that they couldn't find any money." This man is echoed by another man from my village also living abroad who declares that "Africans are rich but don't realize it." He points to Leucena leaves, beekeeping, animal breeding, manure use, and fruit trees as some of the many unexploited money-makers in Africa.
In any case, the point of this entry is to introduce you to the debate that takes place among Africans about who or what to blame for historical and present perceived "under-development.” I would also pose the question: what are the consequences of this debate in terms of the outlook of Africans themselves? Afro-pessimism or chronic pessimism about Africa is often fed by behavioralist explanations for under-development. Afro-pessimism is a huge psychological obstacle blocking its development.
Anthropologist Dennis Garvey reminded me today that societies are like organisms. They are made up of many dynamic components, each of which plays a role in the functioning of the whole. Our organic societies also operate in given environments that contain other societies as well as different quantities and qualities of available resources. So why development occurred is a more complicated question than one may think but I am a firm believer in the geography explanation as opposed to the behavior explanation of the level of development of different peoples. It seems to me that Human behavior, while it looks very different as you travel, is more static than one would think wherever you go in the world.
Also see the entry about Sarkozy's speech in Dakar.
