And Another Thing…

Paul Johnson’s commentaries in The Spectator used this heading. I am borrowing it for occasional thoughts on the subject of this blog – getting Africa up to speed.

That marvelous BBC series, The Ascent of Man, was presented by Dr. Jacob Bronowski in the early 1970s. He, at the very beginning of this, had already seized upon what took me many years to understand – that nurture, not nature is what controls us now. He looked at the Lapps of northern Sweden - 30,000 people and 300,000 reindeer - and demonstrated how the Lapp society had adapted to survival in the frozen tundra by using the animal for their every need, following (not herding) them in their transhumance movements to keep this living, moving support system ready to hand. Similarly the Tibetans, in an even bleaker environment and with only the slow yak to support them, kept their population at a level where their society could survive on the sparse resources of their high rocky plateau by female infanticide.

So too in Africa, where the diseases so absent in the frozen lives of the Lapps and the Tibetans, proliferate, killing infants at a terrible rate. Here society’s survival mechanism required that every fertile woman produce children at a maximum rate, with early marriage, the bride price and polygamy being characteristics of the culture. As Bronowski pointed out, a quarter of a century before I did, culture is the survival mechanism of society.

If Africa’s present development failure could be summarised in one phrase it is that its survival mechanism has not evolved to cope with the changed global environment.