A paragraph in an otherwise fine post from Chris Blattman, “Africa’s Coming Disaster,” rubbed me the wrong way. In the post, Blattman argues that “the next decade could be remembered as the one derailed by the drug trade.”
Ok. Fair enough. Africa’s porous borders, loads of corruption among the various people tasked with policing those borders, and a lack of resources certainly means that the drug trade is a problem that could get worse. But this paragraph strikes me as a bridge of generalization too far:
The 1960s were a decade of hope for Africa. The 1970s were a decade of coups. The 1980s a decade of financial collapse. The 1990s a decade of civil war. The last ten years, hope has come back. Peace and prosperity are returning, and one easily envisions, twenty years from now, a host of nations with four times their current wealth.
The 60s were a decade of hope for Africa, except for those places where it was not (think South Africa, the Portuguese colonies). The 70s were a decade of coups except for the (vast?) majority of places where there were no coups. And so forth. I’m sympathetic with the larger argument, but the analytical process just seems so needlessly shallow. After all, the 1990s might have been “a decade of civil war,” except that almost inarguably the biggest story that came out of Africa in the 1990s was the release of Mandela and the end of Apartheid and the relative peace of the southern tier of the continent that emerged as a result.
And of course the porousness of borders transcends drug smuggling and provides us with an even larger concern, which is varying forms of terrorism, as evidenced by al Shabaab’s terrible attacks in Uganda on the night of the World Cup finals. But as important as this issue and others is and may continue to be, it seems rather reductionist to define an entire continent by just one node of thousands that will help define the continent for the next ten years.
