Learning to Love Africa

{E-mail to Monique Maddy, a businesswoman and author of "Learning to Love Africa: My Journey from Africa to Harvard Business School and Back"]

Monique,

Your book arrived yesterday. I started it last night and am reading this morning. It's great! I started at beginning this morning after reading chapters 10 (Coming to America) and 11 (Georgetown, John Hopkins, Sorrow) last night.

I have been interested in Africa ever since listening to the Books-on-Tape versions of Alan Moorhead's history books, "Blue Nile" and "White Nile." year ago. In college, I read Peter Bauer's books on development economics, especially his research on economic growth in west Africa (1900-1960: a period when in Ghana and I think Ivory Coast, population quadrupled and per person wealth quadrupled, all without foreign capital. This is not to claim these decades of the colonial period were grand, but just that something worked and it is worth researching and understanding.).

I remember trying to argue the importance of markets and capitalism for Africa in an international relations course in college. My professor had a sort of pained expression on his face as he explained to the class that Africa was too poor for the "wastefulness" of competition (five companies making shaving cream, etc). I started copying articles and bringing them to class to offer students another perspective.

I had taken a number of economics classes and my third econ class was an upper division "Social Economics" (i.e. pollution, racism, discrimination, resource depletion, and other reasons why Capitalism was bad. One of the texts was Herman Daly's "The Steady-State Economy," by Al Gore's prof. and mentor). At home on holiday break after taking my Social(ist) Econ course I tried to explain to my father why General Motors was bad for America, how advertisers tricked people into buying things they don't need, and on and on. My father, a businessman, listened politely for awhile (I don't remember how long) before he got angry. I returned to school a little shaken but still confident that international corporations were the problem.

Next quarter I took a Comparative Economic Systems course. I researched and wrote a term paper comparing East and West Germany. That did it. I learned everyday people couldn't buy bananas in communist East Germany. This was in the late 1970s. And the East Germans were shooting people who tried to escape.

Anyway, P.T. Bauer's books were great He died a couple years ago but you can read on Amazon part of "From Subsistence to Exchange and Other Essays" by Peter T. Bauer, Amartya Sen (Introduction)

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0691006679/qid=1108044478/sr=8-3/ref=pd_bbs_3/002-2742113-2247269?v=glance&s=books&n=507846

I remember in the 1980s reading some of Polly Hill's "Development Economics on Trial : The Anthropological Case for a Prosecution" by Polly Hill (which you can also read some on Amazon

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0521310962/qid=1108044593/sr=1-3/ref=sr_1_3/002-2742113-2247269?v=glance&s=books).

You can also watch a wonderful interview with Polly Hill online here:
http://www.alanmacfarlane.com/ancestors/Hill.html

Bauer noted that population had increased four-fold in parts of west Africa from 1900 to 1960, and that average wealth had increased four-fold as well. All, he said, without much foreign capital, and without much foreign direction. Polly Hill's field research was on the cocoa farmers in Ghana. Both Hill and Bauer's work supports the innate entrepreneurial spirit of people (not all people, but enough).

(Also highly recommended is William Easterly's book, "The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economist's Misadventures in the Tropics.")

Anyway, I look forward to reading the rest of Learning to Love Africa.

Greg