"Why Africa Lags"
Marvin Harris
From Our Kind (Harper & Row, 1989)

A century ago, every biologist and anthropologist believed that our kind's races were endowed with unequal aptitudes for achieving industrial civilization. Thomas Huxley (Darwin's bulldog), one of the most learned scientists of his time, avowed:

it may be quite true that some Negroes are better than some white men; but no rational man, cognisant of the facts, believes that the average Negro is the equal, still less the superior of the average white man. And if this be true, it is simply incredible that, when all his [social] disabilities are removed, and our prognathic relative has a fair field and no favour, as well as no oppressor, he will be able to compete successfully with his bigger-brained and smaller-jawed rival, in a contest which is to be carried on by thoughts and not by bites.

Huxley's facts were not facts at all, for subsequent research shows them to be based on unrepresentative samples, faulty measuring techniques, and ethnocentric stereotyping. But for many people of Huxley's generation, the seemingly incontrovertible evidence for racial superiority lay in the failure of blacks and other races to compete successfully against whites in manufacturing, commerce, and war. Whites from Europe and their American counterparts had gained political and economic control over almost the entire human species. Wasn't the technological and industrial backwardness of native Asians, Africans, and Americans proof enough that whites were the superior race? Eager to justify their imperial hegemony, Europeans and North Americans failed to see the hollowness of this argument. They conveniently forgot the great upendings of hist such as the destruction of Rome by "backward" Germanic tribes and the end of 2,000 years of Chinese imperial rule brought on by long-nosed, hairy, red-faced sailors who lived on the other side of the globe in tiny, backward kingdoms.

Alfred Kroeber, founder of the Department of Anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley, succinctly conveyed the irony of Rome's collapse at the hands of despised barbarian races in these words:

Had Julius Casesar or one of his contemporaries been asked whether by any sane stretch of fantasy he could imagine the Britons and the Germans as inherently the equals of Romans and Greeks, he would probably have replied that if these northerners possessed the ability of the Mediterraneans they would long since have given vent to it, instead of continuing to live in disorganization, poverty, ignorance, rudeness, and without great men or products of the spirit.

As for China's racial hubris, nothing tells better than Emperor Ch'ien-Lung's 1792 rejection of a "red-faced barbarian" delegation's request to open up trading relationships. England, the Emperor said, had nothing China wanted. "As your ambassador can see for himself, we possess all things." There was a lot of truth in Ch'ien-Lung's observation. Almost to the end of the eighteenth century, China's technology was as advanced as England's. The Chinese excelled at making porcelain ("chinaware"), silk cloth, and bronze castings. They had invented gunpowder, the first computer (the abacus), the canal lock gate, the iron-chain suspension bridge, the first true mechanical crank, the stern-post rudder, the man-lifting kite, and the escapement, a vital forerunner of European clockwork. In transport, agricultural productivity, and population, the tiny nations of Europe scarcely merited comparison. Ch'ien-Lung's empire stretched from the Arctic Circle to the Indian Ocean and 3,000 miles inland. It had a population of 300 million, all under the control of a single, centralized bureaucracy. It was the biggest and most powerful empire the world had ever seen. Yet in fewer than fifty years after Ch'ien-Lung's arrogant verdict, Chinese imperial power was destroyed, its armies humiliated by a handful of European troops, its seaports controlled by English, French, German, and American merchants, its peasant masses gripped by famine and pestilence.

The burden of racism falls heaviest on those who suffer the scorn of their would-be superiors. But there are costs for the snobs as well as for the snubbed. When people start to believe that the color of their skin or the shape of their nose guarantees their future ascendency, they are usually helping to dig their own graves. I wonder, for example, how much of the humiliation suffered by U.S. industry and commerce at the hands of Japanese competitors stems from racial hubris. In the 1930s, Americans knew the Japanese only as makers of, cheap toys, paper fans, and watches with mainsprings that broke at the first winding. American engineers soberly declaimed that no matter how hard the Japanese might try, they could never catch up with the industrial superpowers, especially with the United States. They didn't have that special inborn quality that Americans called "Yankee ingenuity." How earnestly the Julius Caesars of American industry argued that Japan could only imitate! By no "sane stretch of fantasy" could they imagine that in fifty years Japanese auto imports would bring Detroit to its knees and that Japanese microscopes, cameras, digital watches, calculators, television sets, videorecorders, and dozens of other made-in-Japan consumer products would dominate America's market.

Undaunted by these upendings, many people believe that black Africa is an exception, doomed by its genetic heritage to be a perpetual laggard. Ironically, the Japanese, whose prime minister once publicly attributed America's decline to the presence of too many people of African descent, espouse a similar view. Are the genetic aptitudes for creating a United States or a Japan somehow in short supply in Africa south of the Sahara? In view of the frequency with which those who lag farthest behind in one period move farthest ahead in the next, I do not think racial factors merit serious consideration as an explanation of Africa's predicament. Nor at least until the historical reasons for Africa's lagging pace of development have been thoroughly explored.

In A.D. 500, the feudal kingdoms in West Africa -- Ghana, Mali, Sanghay -- strongly resembled the feudal kingdoms of Europe except for the fact that the Africans were cut off by the Sahara from the heritage of technology and engineering that Rome had bequeathed to Europe. Subsequently, the great desert inhibited the southward flow of Arabic influences that did so much to revitalize European science and commerce. While the people who lived in the Mediterranean basin carried out their trade and warfare on ships and became maritime powers, their dark-skinned counterparts south of the Sahara were mainly concerned with crossing the desert and lacked any motivation for maritime adventures. So when the first Portuguese ships arrived off the Guinea coast in the fifteenth century, they were able to seize control of the ports and seal the fate of Africa for the next 500 years. After exhausting their gold mines, the Africans settled down to hunting slaves to exchange for European cloth and firearms. This led to increased amounts of warfare, rebellion, and the breakup of the indigenous feudal states, cutting short the trajectory of Africa's political development and turning vast portions of the interior into a no-man's-land whose chief product was a human crop bred for export to the sugar, cotton, and tobacco plantations on the other side of the Atlantic.

With the end of the slave trade, the Europeans forced the Africans to farm and mine for them. Meanwhile, colonial authorities made every effort to keep Africa subservient and backward by encouraging tribal wars, by limiting African education to the most rudimentary level possible, and, above all, by preventing colonies from developing an industrial infrastructure that might have made it possible for them to compete on the world market after they achieved political independence. With such a history, Africans will have to be considered not as racial inferiors but as superhumans if they succeed in creating a single advanced industrial society of their own before the middle of the next century.

If you doubt that colonialism could have had such long-lasting consequences, just think of Indonesia and Japan. In the sixteenth century these two island civilizations shared many features of agrarian feudal states. Indonesia became a Dutch colony, while Japan shut its doors to European traders and missionaries, accepting nothing but books as imports from the West, especially technical books that told how to make munitions, build railways, and produce chemicals. After 300 years of close contact with their European masters, Indonesia emerged into the twentieth century an underdeveloped, overpopulated, pauperized basket case, while the Japanese were ready to take their place as the most advanced industrial power in the Far East. Of course, there are other factors to be considered in this story, but race isn't one of them.