Opinion
What can Asia learn from an emerging Africa?
But Moghalu asks the right questions: What is today’s Africa to Africans and what should it be? These are exactly the questions that should also be asked by Asians. In the last 20 years, with the rise of China, India and Asean, Asia has transformed beyond belief, creating global convergence between rich and poor countries even as social inequities worsened at the national level.
Asia as a whole will need to engage the rest of the world, even as its own GDP grows in relative strength. As former governor of the Bank of Israel, and currently nominee to become Federal Reserve board vice-chairman, Stanley Fischer, said at the Asia-Global Dialogue last December, “If emerging markets want a greater say in the global economy, they must contribute ideas and proposals on how to improve the system.”
Seen from a long historical perspective, Africa shares the same colonial history as large parts of Asia. Between 1870 and 1910, as the European nations competed for power, Africa was carved into different colonies, almost exactly as Asia was carved up, except that China was too large to swallow. The period of colonisation, which did not end in Africa until the fall of apartheid, was to leave indelible marks on the African psyche. Hong Kong remained a colony until 1997.
Moghalu framed the issue correctly, when he argued that Africa’s “rise” has not yet happened because the factors that will drive the continent’s renaissance are not yet in place. The chief factor is “a re-invention of the African mind; a re-invention that imbues it with a worldview, mental infrastructure, a philosophical foundation for its prosperity in which Africans think through the world and their place in it before they embark on action.”
Asians are further advanced than Africa in their hard infrastructure of roads, bridges and airports. But what is the mental infrastructure that each Asian nation needs to construct in engaging the modern world, given the disparities of class, race, culture and language?
This is a journey with many twists and turns. What did our ancestors think when they journeyed out of Africa and began to populate Asia, reaching not only to the Pacific, but also crossing the Bering Straits to begin to populate the Americas? The last wave of people out of Africa led by Moses ended up with the Ten Commandments.
Moghalu states succintly the issue that confronts Africa and Asia alike: “Africa has no automatic future. The continent will have a future that it shapes by itself, whether one of prosperity or one in which this moment in time will look, in hindsight, much like the hopes and euphoria yielded by the decolonization of the continent half a century ago.”
