To browse Academia. The text discusses the author's reflections on personal and academic experiences related to African markets and cultural practices. It highlights the influence of colonial and postcolonial development policies on African economies and the cultural challenges that hinder transformation towards self-regulating markets.
The author emphasizes the importance of balancing traditional cultural obstacles with the adoption of individualistic and competitive mindsets to drive economic progress, alongside a description of various cultural and economic activities within African communities.
The theme is as prominent today as it was in However one discusses the statistics or offers stories of woe and hope, the plain fact is that African countries have not industrialised. They have not qualitatively shifted the patterns in the commodities that they export or generated mass wage employment, or appropriated upgraded production technologies: in short, the living conditions of most Africans in are worse than they were in the early s.
While some kind of capitalist transition may have taken place in a number of 'later developers', from the NICS to the BRICS, it is also evident that African political economies have not been static, although many have been stagnant. If anything, a fair characterisation of post-colonial economic change would be that many African countries have suffered excessive change: instability and radical shifts in prices, rates of exchange and so on.
As a result of a high dependence on the export of primary goods with volatile prices, political instability, and a whole range of damaging policies implemented under structural adjustment and poverty reduction strategy papers, a great deal of accumulation in Africa is bifurcated.
