Our Future is African

I invite you to rethink how you understand the world.

You have probably been deeply influenced by linear and hierarchical accounts of human development. Over the last century, a clear plan to bring prosperity to all humans was proposed within a Liberal framework.

In these accounts, progression towards a better life followed a set of clearly established steps. Modernisation, Westernisation, industrialisation, good governance, free markets and liberal democracies. The Washington Consensus.

We now know that this is false. Progression towards a better life for all will not be achieved through this framework. One glaring reason is that Western economies become powerful and rich by employing strategies that are not listed above. This is an empirical fact.

African countries are not going to become wealthy through this set of recommendations either. And this is where it gets interesting.

What I would like you to do is imagine a world where the Washington Consensus no longer holds, and the Liberal World Order unravels.  That seems to be the case already.

Now think about Africa. Not as the doomsday misery portrayed ad nauseam, but in terms of something so different that we need to think outside the box.

This set of blog posts is an invitation to try and imagine what that means. Because one thing is for sure, it will not be the world as we know it. Another certainty is that African youth will be part of making the world that you and I will live in. And we are ill-equipped to know what that means.