RIGHT AND WRONG LESSONS FROM ANCIENT AFRICA.

By ZOL President.

Traditional and ancient African societies have always been collectivist. This is the reason that African nations today find it difficult to organise their modern societies along individualist lines. Since it is an indisputable fact that individualist cultures and economies are always very strong, because they promote individual innovativeness, inventiveness and great individual ambition (which results in the formation of great companies), every African country should work hard at destroying its collectivist psyche and embracing an individualist culture. We should discard “our own” traditional culture of collectivism and pursue individualism. This has nothing to do with “Americanising” - it’s just common sense. Just because America has this kind of culture does not mean they own it, and if we do it, it does not mean we are imitating them. It’s just like religion – just because we are Christians does not mean we are “imitating” other nations or people who believe in Christ or good morals. And just because we are practicing democracy does not mean we are “americanising” ourselves. Or just because we believe that corruption is bad does not mean we are “westernising” ourselves. We all accept these things because they make logical sense, and yet when one suggests that we should also pursue individualism, critics always jump up very irrationally and protest that “we are trying to westernise” or “Americanise” ourselves. And even if that was true, so what? Wouldn’t you rather “Americanise” and survive, instead of remaining true to “our own indigenous culture” and remain as poor as rats? All nations in history that pursued collectivism to its limit (like communist Russia and Ujamaa Tanzania) became extremely poor, inspite of their highly educated masses (proving that education, as important as it is, is not the key to national economic prosperity, as most people still claim – the key is individualism).

I therefore believe that the traditional collectivist African culture that we are so proud of is negative and bad – it should be discarded already. However, even though the political organisation of traditional African societies was wrong, the trade policies of old, traditional Africa were actually very modern. Our trade policies back then were completely ultra-modern and capitalist (and they still believe these things in the villages). This is the only part of our heritage that we should be proud of and it is the part we should learn and preserve – it is the part that other cultures probably imitated from us and prospered from. Unfortunately, this is the part that modern African nations and intellectuals have (almost unanimously) discarded!

Old traditional Africa believed in free trade. In fact, I can go further and suggest that they believed in global free trade (globalisation). In that sense, they were more advanced and more enlightened than most modern intellectuals who always rant against global capitalism and global free trade as some sort of cancer that is responsible for all our problems. Our old traditional chiefs believed in trading with everyone freely – they traded with Arabs, Europeans, Americans – everyone. They even traded among the different African tribes when they could. They believed in both imports and exports, and did not worry too much about “trade deficits” and so on. They would readily welcome the principles of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and its noble goals, whereas we see this body as just another “agent of neo-colonialism” made by Western nations to recolonise us!

Our ancient chiefs, fortunately, did not have any of the modern retrogressive ideas like the ones being propagated by some of our government ministers. They never said we should “Zambianise” this and that or “become self-dependent” in this and that good. They just traded. They gave whatever they had in abundance in exchange for what they did not have. They were outward-looking and liberal-thinking, instead of being irrationally protectionist. [At this point, my friendly critics always remind me that America is also protectionist in some areas, and this is the point I am inclined to quickly respond that I am not discussing how to make America more rich – I am discussing how to make Africa less poor – in other words, the US would even be richer than they are now if they embraced total free trade, but that is not my immediate concern].

The old traditional chiefs would not understand why our Minister of Agriculture wants to ensure that we are completely “self-dependent” in production of fertiliser, for instance. The government is wasting many billions of Kwacha trying to sustain the state owned company that used to produce fertiliser in Kaunda’s socialist era (NCZ). Even though it is logically sensible to just import the fertiliser very cheaply from nations that produce it in surplus quantities, they just want us to be “self reliant”. This, clearly, is nonsense. Why waste so much money trying to produce something and then forcing people to buy it expensively, instead of just letting them import the stuff cheaply? It would be as senseless as saying we need to become “self reliant” in car manufacturing, and banning importation of all cars from outside (our Ministers wouldn’t support this one because it would mean forfeiting their 45 000 dollar Japanese cars!). Most African intellectuals are predisposed to think that this would be a great thing for our economies, but our ancient traditional chiefs would disagree. Our chiefs believed in free and open trade because to them it was just common sense: why should you suffer trying to produce something that is difficult for you if you can simply buy it off someone else, using whatever you have in abundance. The logic is that whatever product you have in abundance, there is someone else who has it in scarcity, and they would also suffer much if they tried to produce it themselves instead of just buying it from you. This is the idea behind the economic idea of “comparative advantages.” Our traditional chiefs understood it without learning about it in Economics 101 – they just saw it intuitively because it is really common sense. Academic theory just captures in words what intelligent people already practice in their daily lives. Traditional African societies have always been intelligent businessmen and economists.

In conclusion, it is unfortunate that old traditional chiefs bequeathed a wrong lesson to us in the way we organise society itself – they practiced collectivism and even dictatorship at times, forcing everyone to conform to certain traditional rituals (whether they wanted to or not) and sometimes even selling their own people as slaves – collectivist societies do not put much value on individual human life because they believe that “society” is the important thing. Our chiefs were wrong on this one.

However, there is one thing that they did right that would help us become a prosperous nation, especially if we combined it with the (individualist) antithesis of their collectivist philosophies: they believed in and practiced completely free trade. Because they did at least one thing right, they never really suffered poverty that much. We, on the other hand, have copied the wrong thing they did and rejected the right thing they did. We promote collectivism in economic management (e.g., nationalisation – which means the whole society owns the company – as opposed to privatisation, etc) and we discourage free trade (discouraging certain imports with protectionist policies, discouraging certain exports –eg banning raw timber exports as our minister recently did, etc). This combination of two wrong things, not common among the modern nations or ancient africa, is the formula for self-destruction. It is the weapon of mass destruction ignorantly designed for us by our own leaders and it is what has led to the perpetual decimation of African societies over the years through its production of extreme poverty in almost every African nation. My wish is that the leaders of Zambia alone would consider these lessons – and change.

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