It is easy to sympathise with David Lammy’s exasperation with Stacey Dooley’s Comic Relief instagrams. My own love of Africa has frustratingly and constantly been questioned by peers who persist in stubbornly envisaging Africa solely as either a benighted continent undeserving of redemption, or an endearing background to have one’s picture taken against. The crux of Mr Lammy’s argument, however; that well-meaning White people posing with poor African children perpetuates a paternalistic narrative that obscures the real story of Africa’s rising middle class and impending economic success, is beyond irresponsible.
Mr Lammy is right to point out that Africa is not the caricature of Western imagination. African economies currently enjoy some of the world’s fastest GDP growth rates. Africa is also pushing ahead with a continent-wide free trade zone while the rest of the world is mired in protectionism and a 2011 African Development Bank report placed the size of Africa’s new middle classes at 313 million people – 34% of the population and roughly the same size as economic powerhouse China’s consumer class. The chronic wars that blighted much of the continent throughout the 1980’s and 90’s have largely dissipated. Most importantly Africa’s population will surge to 2.4 billion by 2050. Paris long ago surrendered its crown as the world’s largest Francophone city to Kinshasa, while five of the 10 largest metropolises in the world will be African by mid-century. Africa’s sheer demographic heft alone is certain to buy the continent far more importance in global affairs than it has ever possessed.
Nonetheless, the picture is not quite as rosy for Africa as Mr Lammy would have us believe. The ‘Africa Rising’ narrative, popular until 2012, collapsed with the end of the Chinese-driven commodities boom. In truth, many African economies remain banished to a Gramscian periphery wherein impressive GDP growth more accurately represents global price changes of a particular commodity rather than internal factors. The famous 2011 AfDB report’s conjectural definition of ‘middle-class’ was given as those living on between $2 and $10 a day. In fact only 4% of Africans enjoy an income greater than $10 a day, and they are mostly concentrated in relatively prosperous South Africa and the Maghreb. Ethiopia, one of the continents best developmental performers, saw the proportion of its population living on more than $10 daily multiply more than 10 times to 2% in the decade to 2014, which still leaves close to 98% of Ethiopians living on less.
In some 40 African countries 50% of the population is under the age of 20, leading Algeria’s Finance Minister, Abderahmane Raouia, to argue that “the biggest challenge for Africa today is job creation”. Unless breakneck economic growth is accompanied by sustainable job creation Africa will face the demographic time bombs that condemned the Middle-East to decades of instability. Vast and poorly-controlled population increases, particularly in the ever-expanding urban areas, will pressure already brittle political stability largely dependent on elite patronage networks. Wars may be less frequent than in the past, but many of Africa’s lynchpin states like the Democratic Republic of the Congo permanently teeter on the edge of a relapse into civil war – even with the support of the largest UN peacekeeping force in history. Additionally, Africa is uniquely ill-equipped to cope with the looming ecological and environmental disasters that climate change will bring.
Former South African President Thabo Mbeki dreamed of an African Renaissance, where the continents woes had been resolved through a raft of African solutions to African problems, namely the New Partnership for Economic Development (NEPAD) policy. Instead South Africa under his successor Jacob Zuma collapsed into kleptocracy and stagnation, while NEPAD is on life support. The euphoria experienced by Zimbabweans at the end of Robert Mugabe’s cartoonish villainy in 2017 proved short lived after Emmerson Mnangagwa unleashed the brutal security forces on protestors in January, and Africa’s economic giant Nigeria has been unable to resolve conflicts with Islamist group Boko Haram in the North-East or between Fulani Muslim herders and Christian farmers on the Jos Plateau. Excessive Afro-pessimism has been harmful in the past, but Afro-sycophancy is worse. The Derg and Hutu regime’s Soviet and French sycophants respectively strove to prevent news of the 1983-5 Ethiopian famine and 1994 Rwandan Genocide from becoming common knowledge, with the result that both were allowed to metastasise into two of the 20 Century’s greatest tragedies.
This is not to say that Africa is hopeless. South Africa’s new-ish President Cyril Ramaphosa has made great strides in rooting out corruption and removing barriers to Black South African participation in the economy. Malawi enjoys the world’s highest level of female representation in legislatures, and peaceful transfers of power by election are fast becoming the norm across Africa rather than an exception. America, Britain, Brazil, China, Germany and India have all awoken to the vast economic gains to be made in Africa and are ramping up investment accordingly. What emerges is therefore a highly complex picture of a continent that cannot be buttonholed into either a backdrop of starving children with swollen bellies or a land of milk and honey. I suspect Mr Lammy is aware of this and is instead invoking Africa as part of his embrace of a domestically-focussed identity politics, seeking to replace a reasoned analysis of an individual’s motives with a simple determination of their views based on one’s racial and socioeconomic group. Such demagoguery is a blemish on the character of an otherwise stellar MP and statesman. Millions of Africans remain mired in abject poverty and dependent on the efforts of aid workers to stay alive. As long as African governments, incapable of providing relief themselves, attacking those who try to help is irresponsible and callous. The Instagram accounts of Ms Dooley and others are ultimately harming no-one except fragile Western adherents of Franz Fanon and Walter Rodney. In the meantime. Africa is still in need of saviours, and some of them are going to be White.