Guest Forum

Making the most of TICAD II:
Africa and Japan are still worlds apart

The second International Conference on African Development (TICAD II) recently concluded in the Japanese capital. Japan and Africa have much to learn from each other.
 

If Japan did not exist, scholars in the field of development studies would have had to invent it, by trying to hypothesize an example of non-western industrial development. Experts would be asking themselves what a non-western yet developed country would look like: In what ways its culture would resemble that of western countries and in what ways it would still be non-western.
 

Thanks to Japan's rapid industrialization during the Meiji era (1868-1912), the question is not a hypothetical one. It can be answered from real life. It is clear from the example of Japan that the use of non-Western languages and writing systems, and the belief in non-Western religions, is no barrier to becoming an advanced industrial society. Thus the Japanese experience in industrialization is more important to the developing world, especially Africa, than that of any other industrialized country.
 

This points to the need for increasing mutual study between Japan and Africa, especially in light of the many failed development schemes that have littered the African landscape. Not only does Africa need to learn more about Japan, but Japan needs to increase and broaden its African studies, making its knowledge of Africa more relevant to the problems African societies face today.
 

Neither African studies specialists nor Africans themselves agree as to the causes of Africa's present predicament. If modernization and industrialization were simple, technical problems in economics they would have been accomplished worldwide long ago. Instead, they have been complex, traumatic and difficult transformations of society and culture everywhere, even in the West. Why these processes have taken place in some countries and not others needs to be understood by a careful examination of the actual experiences of those countries. While it is impossible for mere mortals to understand all the variables involved in the history of any single country, let alone the many countries of Africa, the most varied continent in the world, the conference's emphasis on integrating Africa into the world economy suggests that Japanese leaders are less familiar with the history of the African continent than they should be.
 

For approximately 200 years, from the middle of the seventeenth century until well into the nineteenth century, Africa was integrated into the world economy -- in the worst way. European and American traders brought rum, guns, cloth and other commodities to the African coast and exchanged them for slaves. Success came to African kingdoms not by increasing productivity but by using the guns to capture their neighbors and sell them. Undisciplined mobs of warriors came to dominate society, as others lived in fear of capture and sale. Slavery took over society and tyranny took over the culture of wider and wider areas. Yet, as Africa slid further into darkness and oppression, Africans overseas contributed to the development not only of New World societies but of Europe as well.
 

Soon Africa lost not only its sovereignty but even its last shreds of dignity. European and American thinkers proclaimed that Africa had ever been thus, a continent that had only known darkness, beyond the pale of human history. The memory of ancient Africans, honored in the Bible and in Greek mythology, was all but erased from Western consciousness. This belief -- that Africa has forever existed outside of human history -- is all too common in Japan as well.
 

As Africa entered the colonial era it became even more fatally "integrated into the world economy" as African political and economic structures were redesigned to facilitate external manipulation and control. The physical infrastructure itself was designed to promote the export of primary products and the import of European manufactures, to the detriment of traditional production.
 

Japan, in striking contrast, was almost completely isolated from the world economy during the same period in which Africa was most heavily involved in the slave trade. The coastal people of Japan did not raid the interior to sell others into foreign slavery. Instead, they lived in relative peace and harmony, after the terrible wars of the preceding period. The samurai class gradually evolved from warriors into bureaucrats, many of whom later laid the basis for the modern educational system Japan has today. The traditional work ethic, fine quality craftsmanship, and obsession with education took root in Japan. These Japanese cultural strengths became traditional, smoothing the way for Japan's rapid modernization and development. Japan's twentieth century success thus may well have been because of its isolation rather than in spite of it.
 

The point is not that Africa needs to go through an Edo period of "sakoku", or exclusion of the outside world, but rather that mere integration with the world economy is not enough. Africa has had enough of that already. Despite expectations from the colonial period until today such external integration has not led to the development of Africa but only to worse poverty. What Africa needs most critically is integration with itself. Until internal free trade, transportation, and communication make possible the internal use of African commodities and the growth of the domestic African market, it is doubtful whether foreign investment alone will be capable of modernizing and industrializing Africa.
 

Japan needs to increase and diversify its study of Africa, especially the history of that unhappy continent, its ancient greatness, and its long slide into misery. Japan's lack of involvement in UNESCO's major project to study the African slave trade is especially surprising in the context of Japan's high profile in UNESCO and its proclaimed devotion to the cause of African development. Japan should patronize and participate in this major attempt to study the nature and effects of the slave trade on Africa. Of all the developed countries Japan was the least involved in the African slave trade. Thus, it has nothing to fear from the call for reparations that has been voiced by many in Africa and elsewhere.
 

Without serious expansion and diversification of Japanese African studies, particularly a better appreciation of African history, TICAD II runs the risk of being judged by history as at best another well-intentioned but fatally flawed development project, at worst as a rather crude and cynical attempt to buy votes at the United Nations.