Over the last quarter of a century, the African crisis of the late 1970s has been transformed into what has aptly been called the ‘African Tragedy’.footnote¹ In 1975, the regional GNP per capita of Sub-Saharan Africa stood at 17.6 per cent of ‘world’ per capita GNP; by 1999 it had dropped to 10.5 per cent. Relative to overall Third World trends, Sub-Saharan health, mortality and adult-literacy levels have deteriorated at comparable rates. Life expectancy at birth now stands at 49 years, and 34 per cent of the region’s population are classified as undernourished. African infant-mortality rates were 107 per 1,000 live births in 1999, compared to 69 for South Asia and 32 for Latin America. Nearly 9 per cent of Sub-Saharan 15 to 49-year-olds are living with HIV/AIDS—a figure that soars above those of other regions. Tuberculosis cases stand at 121 per 100,000 people; respective figures for South Asia and Latin America are 98 and 45.footnote²

The main purpose of this essay is to recast this transformation in world-historical perspective, locating Sub-Saharan Africa’s experience within the broader bifurcation of Third World destinies that has taken place since 1975. This recasting, in turn, serves a double purpose. On the one hand, it is meant to assess the extent to which the crisis and tragedy could have been foreseen using the particular variety of political economy that John Saul and I introduced in the late 1960s.footnote³ On the other hand, it will seek to remedy what in retrospect seem to me the most glaring deficiencies, not just of our (‘old’) variety of political economy, but also and especially of the ‘new’ variety that rational-choice theorists and practitioners introduced in the 1980s in response to the crisis.

I shall proceed as follows. I first lay out the main theses that Saul and I advanced before the crisis set in, and compare these with the claims of the ‘new’ political economy. I then analyse the stylized facts of the African crisis to show that the years around 1980 constitute a major turning point in Sub-Saharan fortunes in the global political economy; and offer a first-cut explanation of it focusing on the radical change in the overall context of Third World development that occurred between 1979 and 1982. In the final sections of the essay, I move to a second-cut explanation, which concentrates on the extremely uneven impact of this change in global context on different Third World regions, paying special attention to the sharp contrast between the fortunes of Africa and East Asia; and conclude with a brief assessment of what African elites and governments could have done to avoid the African tragedy or to neutralize its most destructive aspects.

Over the last twenty years the dominant interpretation of the African crisis has traced it to an alleged propensity of the elites and ruling groups of Africa for ‘bad policies’ and ‘poor governance’. The definition of these, as well as the reasons for the alleged African addiction to them, has varied. But the idea that the primary responsibility for the African tragedy lies with African elites and governments has been common to most interpretations. As we shall see, in recent years this idea has been challenged by some authoritative investigations of the determinants of economic performance in Third World countries. This challenge, however, has remained implicit and has had little impact on the dominant view of the crisis.

The most influential text in launching the standard interpretation was a World Bank document of 1981, known as the Berg Report.footnote⁴ Its assessment of the causes of the African crisis was highly ‘internalist’, sharply critical of the policies of African governments for having undermined the process of development by destroying agricultural producers’ incentives to increase output and exports. Overvalued national currencies, neglect of peasant agriculture, heavily protected manufacturing industries and excessive state intervention were singled out as the ‘bad’ policies most responsible for the African crisis. Substantial currency devaluations, dismantling industrial protection, price incentives for agricultural production and exports, and substitution of private for public enterprise—not just in industry but also in the provision of social services—were singled out as the contrasting ‘good’ policies that would rescue Sub-Saharan Africa from its woes.

The diagnoses and prognoses of the Berg Report converged with those of another highly influential text also published in 1981—Robert Bates’s Markets and States in Tropical Africa, which rapidly acquired classic status as an exposition both of the ‘new’ political economy and of the perils of state intervention in underdeveloped countries.footnote⁵ In Bates’s view, state officials in newly independent African countries used the powerful instruments of economic control that they had inherited from colonial regimes to benefit urban elites and, first and foremost, themselves. By destroying farmers’ incentives to increase agricultural output, these policies undermined the process of development. Bates’s answer to the problem—dismantling state power and leaving the peasantry free to take advantage of market opportunities—was similar to that advocated by the World Bank in the Berg and subsequent reports on Africa.footnote⁶

Nevertheless, his interpretation of the crisis was both more pessimistic and more radically anti-statist than that of the World Bank. For World Bank assessments of the situation were ostensibly based on a double assumption. They assumed that an important reason for the ‘bad’ policies was that African governments had failed to understand their negative effects, and that the positive effects of ‘good’ policies, once implemented, would generate widespread support for their continuation. The only (or main) thing needed to solve the crisis, therefore, was to persuade African governments that the switch from bad to good policies was in their own and their constituencies’ interests. By introducing historical and social-structural considerations—the powerful instruments of domination that African elites inherited from colonial rule; conflicts among ethnic, regional and economic groups and classes for power—the ‘new’ political economy (henceforth NPE) was far more sceptical than the World Bank about the likelihood that African governments could be persuaded to switch from ‘bad’ to ‘good’ policies and that they would stick to ‘good’ policies after the switch.footnote⁷ At least implicitly, therefore, the anti-statism of the NPE sought not just to set market forces free from governmental constraints and regulations, as the World Bank advocated. It also aimed to undermine the legitimacy of the social coalitions that controlled the state—forces that were seen as irremediably committed to ‘bad’ policies as effective means in the reproduction of their own power and privilege.