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How Western Ignorance Has Been Plundering Africa / Bronwen Everill

Alice seely harris  picture of bompenju  lofiko  a third person  john harris and edgar stannard with the hands of lingomo and bolengo  which have allegedly been killed by sentries of the abir  may 1904

You get a spread of well-meaning people who are hoping that advances in things like microcredit are going to bring entrepreneurship to African and rural communities that are unconnected by formal banking systems. And you get a very similar kind of, ‘well, let's make the product smaller and then we can give it to more people and we can expand this product’. The big argument of my book is that a lot of these solutions throughout the history of western engagement with Africa are kind of like that proverb, ‘to a man with a hammer. Everything looks like a nail’, right? Like whatever the newest thing is in the West, that seems to be like, it'll be the solution for whatever Africa's supposed problems are, right? They're seeing a nail, they've got a hammer. But actually on the ground, microfinance is a really good example because actually there's lots of indigenous ways of thinking about credit and doing credit and thinking about entrepreneurship. And I laughed when I said, ‘you know, that like credit is microcredit that is gonna bring entrepreneurship to Africa because like, there's just entrepreneurship everywhere. And the idea that the west has to incentivize entrepreneurship, that like otherwise people are gonna be lazy as a really persistent myth throughout the 18th century… 19th century… all the way up to today.

Bronwen Everill joins This Is Hell! to talk about her new book "Africonomics: A History of Western Ignorance”, published by The New Press

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Bromwen everill
Guest

Bronwen Everill

Bronwen Everill is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the former director of the Centre of African Studies at the University of Cambridge. Her writing has appeared in Foreign Policy, the Times Literary Supplement, and Smithsonian Magazine. She is the author of Not Made by Slaves and Abolition and Empire in Sierra Leone and Liberia as well as Africonomics (The New Press). She teaches writing at Princeton and is a research affiliate of the Laboratory for the Economics of Africa‘s Past at Stellenbosch University.