top of page

Africa Is Not Developing. It Is Recovering.

Aug 23
9 min read

The word we use to describe the continent's trajectory is not a matter of semantics. It is priced into the cost of capital.


In 1879 a British medical student named Robert Felkin was passing through the kingdom of Bunyoro-Kitara, in what is now Uganda. He witnessed a surgery.


The surgeon washed his hands. He washed the woman’s abdomen. He used banana wine as both anesthetic and antiseptic, made a single incision, delivered the child alive, cauterized the bleeding vessels with a heated iron, and closed the wound with seven iron pins. Mother and child both lived. Felkin stayed eleven days to watch the recovery. By the time he left, the wound had healed completely.


He was watching something routine. The Bunyoro surgeons performed this operation regularly and had done so for generations. That same year, in London, a surgical section was close to a death sentence, and Joseph Lister was still meeting resistance trying to persuade British surgeons that antisepsis was real.


The knife sits in the Science Museum in London today. You can look it up. It is catalogued as an object. I think it is evidence, and I think the wrong word has been sitting on top of it for a century.


Recently, I was kindly invited to speak at the Oxford Africa Business Forum at the Saïd Business School, and someone asked me what Africa needs most in order to develop.


I said I thought the word “develop” was the problem. Africa is not developing. Africa is recovering.


Development is directional language. It assumes a starting point near zero and a destination somebody else has already reached. Everything built on top of that assumption inherits it. Capacity building. Leapfrogging. Catching up. Emerging. Each one carries a quiet story in which African institutional life begins around the point of foreign contact, and everything before that gets filed under heritage.


Bunyoro is not heritage. Bunyoro is a documented surgical outcome, in a specific year, that Europe and elsewhere could not match.


What was already here?


It isn’t that Africa had rich cultures, which nobody seriously disputes and which changes nothing about how capital gets priced.


It is that Africa had functioning systems and market architecture. One of the world’s oldest and longest trade routes running thousands of miles. Credit instruments. Standardized weights. Legal codes governing commerce between sovereign states that had no shared ruler and no shared religion.


Trans-Saharan routes carried gold from the Bambuk fields through Timbuktu to Cairo and into Europe, on terms set by African rulers, because African rulers held the supply and everyone knew it. On the eastern seaboard, Kilwa, Sofala and Mogadishu were working nodes in an Indian Ocean system that connected this continent to Gujarat and Guangzhou centuries before it connected to Lisbon. What moved along those routes was not only raw material. Coffee, textiles, cosmetics and calendar systems went out along them and are in daily use everywhere today, generally with the origin quietly removed.


The Baqt, negotiated between Christian Nubia and Islamic Egypt, governed trade and movement across a contested border for roughly six hundred years. Two states with different faiths, different languages and a live territorial dispute, running a working cross-border agreement for six centuries. Nubian Christianity predates the Christianization of the world, which gives you some sense of how much of this timeline runs backwards from what most people were taught.

Bunyoro was not an isolated case either. African surgical and pharmacological practice was systematic, taught, and in several documented instances a century or more ahead of the European equivalent.


That is institutional capacity, and it is the exact thing this continent is currently assumed to lack. I have spent the last decade documenting it case by case.


If you want to understand how it was interrupted, look at the colonial infrastructure across Africa. It was intentional and aimed.

Roughly 90 percent of African railway track was laid before independence, and the geometry barely varies between empires. Lines run from an interior mine or plantation to a coastal port. Almost nothing runs sideways, from one African city to another. Roberto Bonfatti and Steven Poelhekke found the same signature in mining corridors specifically, which specialize in connecting mines to the coast rather than to neighboring countries.


The economists Rémi Jedwab and Alexander Moradi have traced what that did over the long run. The railways themselves stopped mattering decades ago, displaced by road and air freight. The economic geography they created did not go away. Where economic activity sits on this continent today still follows track that was pulled up a lifetime ago.


Which brings us to a number that gets quoted constantly and understood almost never. Intra-African trade runs at roughly 15 percent of the continent’s total. In Asia the equivalent is 61 percent. In Europe, 67. Afreximbank puts the 2023 figure at 14.9 percent, climbing slowly.


That number is almost always presented as immaturity, as markets that have not grown up yet. Fifteen percent is what happens when you interrupt a network and never reconnect it. Asia was in the same position, and chose the other word.


In 1820, China accounted for around 33 percent of global GDP and India around 16. Between them, close to half the world economy. By 1950, after a century of colonial extraction, war and forced trade, China was at 4.5 percent and India at 4.2. A combined share of under 9 percent, down from 49. Asia as a whole went from 58 percent of global GDP in 1820 to 27 percent by 1913.


That is not a story about countries that were poor and are now growing. It is a story about the largest economies on earth being dismantled and slowly putting themselves back together. And that is precisely how they tell it.


Nobody writes that China is developing. The vocabulary is return, re-emergence, restoration, rise. Indian economic commentary describes the current moment as a rise after a thousand years of decline. Chinese state narrative runs the same line through the century of humiliation and out the other side. The past is not decoration in either case. It is the baseline being restored.


The Belt and Road Initiative is the clearest expression of it. Announced by Xi Jinping in 2013 as a Silk Road Economic Belt and a 21st Century Maritime Silk Road, it is explicitly framed as the revival of the ancient Silk Road, now covering around 4.4 billion people and $21 trillion in combined GDP. The scholarship on it is blunt about the mechanism. Tim Winter describes BRI as resting on a compelling, romanticized idea of premodern history, deliberately deployed. Other work notes that the old routes were weakened over recent centuries and are now being reinstalled across Eurasia.


You do not have to admire the project to see what the framing does. BRI is heavily criticized, on debt terms, on strategic intent, on how selectively the history gets told. But as a piece of positioning it worked. It turned a vast, unprecedented, multi-country infrastructure program into the continuation of something that had already run for a thousand years. Not a bet on a market that has never existed. A reconnection of one that did.


Africa has the identical case and does not make it. What differs is not the history. It is which continent gets to describe itself in the language of restoration, and which gets described in the language of catching up.


This is the part where the word stops being an argument about history.


The African Continental Free Trade Area connects 54 countries, 1.4 billion people and a $3.4 trillion market.


Read through the development frame, it is an unprecedented experiment. No continent has attempted integration at this scale from this starting point, there is no template, and the execution risk is enormous. That is broadly how it gets discussed, and roughly how it gets priced.


Read through the recovery frame, it becomes a restoration of trading systems that already did this for centuries. Caravans crossed the Sahara between the West African goldfields and Mediterranean, moving gold and salt and textiles and books through Timbuktu, Gao and Kano. The Nile carried goods between North Africa and Sudan interior. Red Sea ports linked the Horn to Arabia and Mediterranean. The Swahili coast, from Mogadishu down through Mombasa, Kilwa and Sofala, sat inside a monsoon-driven Indian Ocean network reaching West Asia, India and China. Overland routes ran through Sahel from Senegal to Lake Chad and on to the Nile. Copper and gold moved north out of Great Zimbabwe and the Katanga belt to reach the coast. The Congo basin and the West African forest zones fed kola, ivory, cloth and metalwork into all of it.

What existed was a continental trade network with external ports attached. It ran at scale for centuries, across languages, currencies and faiths, and it did not end in economic failure. It was dismantled.

The projections start to read differently too. UNECA expects the agreement to lift intra-African trade by 45 percent by 2045, around $275 billion, with agrifood up 60 percent and industry 48. Under the development frame those are heroic assumptions about a market that has never existed. Under the recovery frame they are a partial return toward a level of internal trade this continent sustained before the rail lines were pointed at the sea.


What it costs to keep the wrong word?


African countries pay roughly 1.5 percentage points more to borrow than comparable economies elsewhere, largely because of subjectivity in how sovereign credit ratings get assigned. Analysts frequently rate countries they have never visited.


Do the arithmetic. On a one billion dollar bond, 1.5 points is fifteen million dollars a year leaving the country for reasons that are not in the numbers. Over a ten-year term, one hundred and fifty million. That is a teaching hospital. Per bond.

The UNDP put the total at more than $24 billion in excess interest and $46 billion in lending that never happened across the bonds they studied. The combined figure is larger than all the development assistance Africa received in 2021.


Moody’s own data on infrastructure project finance defaults places Africa among the lowest default rates in the world, below Latin America and Asia, though the agency notes the sample sizes are small. The African Development Bank has been saying this publicly since 2022. Spreads have barely moved.


If a premium survives the performance data, it has stopped measuring risk. It is measuring an assumption, and African borrowers are covering the cost of it. The assumption is the development story. That things here are new, the track record is short, the institutions are still learning. Every time that frame gets used, including by African governments in their own strategy documents and investment prospectuses, the premium gets a little more solid.


What would change?


  1. What gets measured. If the constraint is severance rather than absence, the metrics worth tracking are the ones that show reconnection. Corridor throughput. Cross-border payment friction. Harmonized standards. Transit times between African cities. These are auditable in a way that catching up never was, because catching up has no finish line and no one has to report against it.


  2. Where solutions get sourced. Indigenous systems belong in evaluation pipelines as tested technology rather than in museums as objects. Agronomy, water management, dispute resolution, climate adaptation. Bunyoro tells you something about where sophisticated answers have come from historically, and procurement should behave accordingly.


  3. Who produces the data. African finance ministries and continental institutions need to generate independent, timely, credible performance data and push it directly into the rooms where capital gets allocated. The Africa Credit Ratings Initiative, built by UNDP with the AfDB, UNECA, ACET and the African Peer Review Mechanism, is the right shape for this. The perception gap will not close on its own, because nobody on the other side of it is losing money.


What my grandfather taught me


In the 1940s my grandfather, Ibrahim Alhaj Daoud, built one of the first public libraries in Sudan, in a major city called Kassala. The books came by train from Cairo, Lagos, Beirut, London, and beyond into a region the colonial administration had written off entirely.


He built it out of his father’s Sufi school, which had been teaching in that town long before anyone in London drew the border. He did not start something. He extended something. That is the entire distinction, and he had it worked out 80 years before I stood up in a lecture theatre in Oxford to argue about a word.

He was not developing anything. He was recovering something, under conditions designed to interrupt it. So was the surgeon in Bunyoro-Kitara, with his banana wine. So, on the better days, am I.


Africa is recovering what was interrupted and building what the 21st century demands. The failure to recognize both is costing the continent billions.


📖 Stolen Genius: A journey across 320,000 years of African innovation. This collection brings together the researched stories of African innovation across medicine, science, philosophy, theology, architecture, agriculture, and more, tracing the depth and continuity of African genius across the full span of human history. 📩 Pre-Order the Book

Further reading


 
 
 

Comments

bottom of page