Africonomics: A History of Western Ignorance

by Bronwen Everill

'A historically insightful read' Financial Times

'A wry, rollicking, and provocative history' Michael Taylor, author of The Interest

‘A thought-provoking analysis of Africa's relationship with economic imperialism’ Astrid Madimba and Chinny Ukata, authors of It’s A Continent

We need to think differently about African economics.

For centuries, Westerners have tried to ‘fix’ African economies. From the abolition of slavery onwards, missionaries, philanthropists, development economists and NGOs have arrived on the continent, full of good intentions and bad ideas. Their experiments have invariably gone awry, to the great surprise of all involved.

In this short, bold story of Western economic thought about Africa, historian Bronwen Everill argues that these interventions fail because they start from a misguided that African economies just need to be more like the West. Ignoring Africa's own traditions of economic thought, Europeans and Americans assumed a set of universal economic laws that they thought could be applied anywhere. They enforced specifically Western ideas about growth, wealth, debt, unemployment, inflation, women’s work and more, and used Western metrics to find African countries wanting.

The West does not know better than African nations how an economy should be run. By laying bare the myths and realities of our tangled economic history, Africonomics moves from Western ignorance to African knowledge.

*Shortlisted for the BCA African Business Book of the Year*

Genres: Nonfiction, Africa, Economics, History

Audible Audio

Published October 10, 2024

Reviews

[Christy Matthews · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was really hopeful for this book, but too much of it is anecdotes and biological information on certain, primarily European, individuals. There were less key takeaways and guidance than I would like to see in a developmental economics book.

[Haj · Rating 3 out of 5]

this is a fine book. not a good book, just a fine one. i felt like it focused a lot on just on random people who i have no doubt played massive parts in african economics, but barely on the bigger picture.
i don’t know, i just feel like it was lacking more in depth information.

[Suzammah · Rating 2 out of 5]

This wasn’t quite what I was expecting. I wanted more analysis from an African perspective but what I largely got was anecdotes within a European structure. There were some interesting chapters, particularly around the economics of the end of slavery and state formation, but much left unexplored.

[Elena C · Rating 1 out of 5]

Almost dnf it.

[Ajay · Rating 5 out of 5]

For centuries, Westerners have tried to ‘fix’ African economies. Missionaries, philanthropists, and development economists have arrived on the continent, full of good intentions and bad ideas. Invariably their experiments have gone awry. In this concise, bold story of Western economic thought about Africa, historian Bronwen Everill argues that these interventions fail because they start from a misguided premise that African economies just need to be more like the West. We see how the application of Western ideas of growth, wealth, debt, unemployment, and culture has resulted in repeated miscalculations, with unintended and tragic consequences. By laying bare the myths and realities of our tangled economic history, Africonomics shines a humorous light on Western ignorance.

We see through the eyes of Anna Maria Falconbridge, who published a narrative history of her 1790s visit to Sierra Leone. When Falconbridge met with the Temne leader, King Naimbanna, she fixated on the contrast between his opulent, gold-embroidered tunic and his stockings, which were full of holes. To her Western eyes, ragged clothes signaled poverty and economic stagnation. She misunderstood what she was looking at. In West African society at the time, power, security, and affluence were not measured by the material luxury items a leader owned or wore; the King wore European clothes merely to impress his foreign guests. Instead, true wealth was defined by the size of one's social network, meaning the number of dependents, kin groups, and followers a leader could mobilize. This focus on "wealth in people" was not actually a bizarre or backwards concept. In Georgian and Victorian Britain, an individual's status and ability to accumulate capital relied heavily on social ties, patronage, and dependency networks. Yet, Europeans dismissed African society as primitive because they failed to recognize that their own societies functioned on remarkably similar systems of relational power.

This blinding hubris had deepened by the nineteenth century when British abolitionist Thomas Fowell Buxton campaigned for legitimate commerce in West Africa. He cloaked his mission in the paternalistic language of humanitarianism while acting in the raw self-interest of British manufacturers who were desperate to recover the highly profitable trade lost after the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade. Operating under the arrogant assumption that West Africa was an economic vacuum devoid of sophisticated agriculture, Buxton launched the ill-fated Niger Expedition of 1841 to plant a Western-style model farm. The ultimate hypocrisy was that Britain itself had not actually figured out how to evolve its economy beyond forced labor; Lancashire factories still relied heavily on American slave-grown cotton. Yet, while still dependent on the very system they claimed to oppose, British humanitarians confidently lectured Africans on economic morality. Buxton’s model farm completely ignored the thriving indigenous agricultural success, sophisticated trade networks, and advanced textile industries of the Sokoto Caliphate. While the Caliphate did utilize slave labor, nearby regions in Senegal and the Gambia proved that African societies were already independently evolving toward successful farming economies built around peanuts, rice, and agricultural-spiritual cooperatives. Predictably, the Niger Expedition was a catastrophic failure, devastated by tropical disease and a complete lack of local viability, forcing a swift British retreat. The ruined model farm serves as a literal and symbolic monument to Western hubris, illustrating a historical pattern of Westerners refusing to learn from local African knowledge.

This refusal to learn from local conditions directly fueled one of the most toxic and enduring myths of the colonial era: the idea that Africans were naturally lazy and content with idle poverty. Missionaries and colonial administrators arrived with the rigid, clock-bound logic of the European Industrial Revolution, convinced that true civilization required teaching Africans how to be free industrial laborers working fixed hours for a wage. When Africans refused to participate in these highly exploitative systems, Europeans attributed it to inherent racial laziness rather than looking at the terrible economic incentives they were offering. African workers were making entirely rational economic choices, choosing to work their own land, participate in local markets, or engage in seasonal farming rather than subject themselves to grueling plantation labor for pennies. To the colonial mind, if a person was working for their own subsistence or communal survival rather than producing a surplus for European export markets, they were viewed as unemployed. The ultimate irony is that this myth of African idleness was used to justify the return of forced labor. When religious moralizing failed, colonial governments introduced taxes, like the hut tax, which could only be paid in colonial currency. This forced Africans into the wage-labor market, and if that still failed, administrators used the myth of natural laziness to justify forced labor, little different from slavery, under the guise of teaching natives the dignity of work. The Western obsession with fixing African employment was never about helping Africans achieve economic independence; it was a tool to break down self-sufficient indigenous economies and force people into a global capitalist machine on deeply unfavorable terms.

For centuries, European observers smugly dismissed cowrie shells, viewing them as proof of a primitive barter system and mocking West Africans for trading valuable resources for seashells. This was a profound misreading born of colonial arrogance. In reality, West Africans were utilizing a highly sophisticated, strictly managed currency system that sustained an entire regional economy for centuries. Because cowries were uniform, durable, impossible to counterfeit, and had to be imported all the way from the Indian Ocean, local rulers could not artificially increase the supply. This geographical restriction effectively acted as a natural central bank, keeping the currency incredibly stable and deeply integrated into advanced local systems of credit, trade, and statecraft. The real money problems only began when Europeans interfered with the system they failed to comprehend. Seeking to maximize their own profits, European merchants weaponized their access to the Indian Ocean, flooding West African markets with massive volumes of imported cowries. By drastically oversupplying the market, Western powers triggered catastrophic hyperinflation and severe currency devaluation, completely destabilizing once-resilient economies. The structural collapse that followed was a direct result of institutional ignorance. Because colonial administrators completely lacked an understanding of how the currency functioned, they misdiagnosed the chaos and failed to see their own role in it. Consequently, the solutions, such as arbitrarily outlawing cowries and mandating unstable European paper currencies, only deepened the financial ruin, replacing a stable domestic system with external economic dependency.

Everill moves from the destruction of indigenous monetary systems to the deliberate engineering of colonial market structures, criticizing the assumption that economic development is a single, universal trajectory where Africa just needs to become more like the West to catch up. In colonies like Uganda, the British created artificial, racialized class structures that crippled local wealth accumulation. Rather than allowing a free market to develop where Africans could control the entire supply chain, the colonial administration engineered a tiered system. Africans were legally restricted to farming, while Indian immigrants were granted exclusive licenses to act as middlemen, cotton ginners, and moneylenders. This friction was a feature of colonial economic design, not an accident. By barring Africans from moving up the value chain, the British ensured that capital was drained away from local communities. When global prices fluctuated and debts piled up, local resentment targeted the Indian middlemen rather than the colonial policies that rigged the system. Everill guides us through examples like this to the inescapable conclusion that unequal development was Western policy.

However, the past has not yet passed; structural exploitation persists. Even as newly sovereign states gained political independence, they remained economically dependent on their former masters. Everill highlights the experience and theories of Egyptian economist Samir Amin, who arrived in Mali in 1960 to advise the government and frequently clashed with the World Bank. Amin became a pioneer of dependency theory and world-system analysis, advocating for the Global South to delink from the global capitalist system. His work underpins a fierce criticism of the Bretton Woods institutions, showing how the models of the World Bank and IMF are built on flawed data and misguided metrics that trap nations in inescapable debt and stagnant growth.

This critique of macroeconomic structures leads into what was, for me, the most impactful part of the book: Everill’s takedown of hyper-individualistic hustle culture and the myth of doing well by doing good. When she critiques the idealistic business school graduate backpacking through a developing country, convinced that a flash of social entrepreneurship will solve systemic poverty, it hit incredibly close to home. I felt like I was being personally asked to rethink my life's mission. It forces you to confront an uncomfortable truth: so much of what we call "development" is designed to validate the savior complex of the Westerner rather than actually address structural realities. In the course of reading this book, I've become convinced that solutions must come from the ground up; the West must look past its hubris if it is to genuinely help the rest.

This need for authentic, ground-up solutions becomes clear when Everill examines modern financial innovation, specifically the rise of mobile money. Western observers frequently misread the success of platforms like M-Pesa, framing it as a case of Vodafone disrupting a passive African market. In reality, Everill highlights that the platform succeeded almost despite its corporate vision. It was the users themselves who drove the innovation, finding a novel use case that improved upon the existing local practice of using prepaid mobile minutes as a currency.

While M-Pesa shows the power of aligning with existing local structures, other Western-backed financial interventions have weaponized existing social dynamics to disastrous effect. Microfinance initiatives, inspired by Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank, have had a meaningful positive legacy in Bangladesh. Yet, global capital eagerly seized upon the scheme, seeing microloans to the global poor backed by local communal ties as the new frontier of finance. By using peer pressure within a community group to guarantee loan repayment, the microfinance boom tried to substitute aspirations for structural change with hyper-individualism. Underpinned by the belief that anyone can "raise themselves by their bootstraps", microfinance and entrepreneurship became a way to end global poverty and turn a healthy profit at the same time. Unfortunately, microfinance could not build infrastructure, stabilize a currency, or secure fair, stable commodity prices. By reducing development to providing credit to the poor, the massive risks of a volatile global market were transferred entirely onto the most vulnerable. Lenders miscalculated risk, but it was borrowers who bore the consequences: saddled with high-interest debt and no structural safety net. The aggressive expansion of microfinance across Africa has left an often tragic legacy of inescapable debt traps and farmer suicides.

This same philosophy has left the door wide open for a proliferation of get-rich-quick schemes, from speculative cryptocurrency apps to predatory pyramid schemes. A prime example of this occurred when Sergey Mavrodi and his MMM network swept through countries like Nigeria, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. By rebranding a classic Ponzi scheme as a mutual aid fund, MMM hijacked the exact same communal safety nets and social trust leveraged by corporate microfinance. By exploiting the desperate desire for upward mobility and shifting the focus away from structural reform toward speculative individual windfalls, these scams ultimately left African communities economically hollowed out.

The persistent lack of understanding of local structures has also shaped how the West views the economic role of African women. For centuries, European colonialists looked at African societies and saw women performing heavy agricultural labor, trading in markets, and managing households. Because this did not align with the Victorian ideal of the domesticated housewife, colonial administrations intervened actively to enforce Western gender roles. Colonial laws stripped women of traditional land-tenure rights and political authority, undermining women's rights and disrupting local societies reliant on them. When African girls and their families advocated for rigorous schooling, demanding literacy, mathematics, and bookkeeping to navigate and expand their traditional roles in commerce, Western administrators denied the request. Instead, they restricted the curriculum to domestic science, needlework, and laundry. Authorities were determined to reshape independent African market women into subservient housewives, actively dismantling their economic agency under the guise of civilizing them.

This history exposes a profound irony in Western development discourse. Today, the West has completely reversed its position, confidently arguing that female empowerment is the magic bullet for economic growth. They routinely criticize African social norms, fundamentally misreading how deeply integrated women already are in politics and the local workforce, while ignoring their own history of suppressing those exact rights on the continent. Everill convincingly argues that the link between development and female empowerment has become entirely distorted. Women's rights should be pursued for its own sake, not as a tool to achieve economic efficiency and growth.

Time and again, the outsiders who have tried to 'fix' Africa haven't known better than the people living and working there, raising families and making ends meet. This book is a passionate, funny, and exceptionally well-written argument to transition from Western ignorance to African knowledge. Economic justice and true development can only be achieved when the West steps back and allows African nations to shape their economic futures on their own terms. It's the rare book that teaches history and economics this well and makes me question my own assumptions on nearly every page.

[Benjamin · Rating 1 out of 5]

Anecdotes or abstraction with little in between. The book is dry and dense. Frankly, it feels like an academic text loosely dressed up for popular consumption. Most of the content relates to the 18th century through WW2 and almost none of it is current. Moreover the discussion focuses on economic theory applied stylistically to Africa and either forces the point its trying to make or fails to get to one at all.

[Ace · Rating 5 out of 5]

As an undergrad economics student, I have had an instinctual feeling that there is something wrong with our courses, and this book clearly and accurately puts that into words. The analysis and examples are enlightening, turning western economics theory on its head while revealing the origins of ideas we hold as immutable. Very interesting read.

[Tana · Rating 3 out of 5]

With BRICS taking off, this really interested me. Overall not a bad book. Could have been much shorter.

Introduction
Interesting backstory that starts in Liberia. I had no idea that Liberia was "colonised" by formerly enslaved people who had moved from the USA to Liberia, which created an unequal society between the indigenous Africans and those that arrived from the US with their western connections and ideals. The author then discusses the differences between Sierra Leone and Liberia.

1. A King with no Holey Stockings, or Measuring Wealth
Introduces Anna Maria Falconbridge who (around 1790s) sheds light on the European view of Africa, from her meeting at Naimbana with King of the Temne and his court. What these Europeans observe as "backwards" isn't so different to the systems in Europe, only that Europeans put value on things that Africans don't. Such as wearing expensive garments, which for the Africans is worn as homage for their European guests but for Anna, she notices holes in the stockings and mud huts for homes (in my opinion these Africans were ahead of the curve in building environmentally friendly homes and not wearing fast fashion).

2. Learning to be Farmers
Introduces Thomas Fowell Buxton, a "philanthropist" who believed that the opening of a good economy was the natural result of good economy, and thus the slave trade, which suppressed all other trade was a detriment to Africa's progress and development giving too much power to despotic African leaders. He prosed property rights, which was a very poor understanding of African understanding of land (which was more communal guardianship with tribal leaders) and using the Royal navy to set up model farms, petitioning Parliament in the 1830s.
Compares the weavers of Spitalfields, Victorian workhouses and enslaved labour.
Introduces Obi Ossai, who was unsure on how to transition away from the slave trade without his people suffering. The same problem was faced by Mohammed Bello (born in 1791), who founded the Sokoto Caliphate that covered Burkina Faso to Chad, to northern Cameroon with a population between 10 to 20 million people. The solution for the latter was to create frontier colonies that focused on Agriculture, which resulted in the increase of cotton production. Slaves were still used but were not sold to the Atlantic but worked for Africans.

3. Getting People Back to Work
Once slavery ends, the owners of wealth discover that people aren't keen to work all hours, which lead to some such as Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill to debate whether Africans were inherently lazy, and French colonial administrators justified the use of compulsory labour by suggesting as such. This belief led to Europeans moving to the colonies to seek wealth and high wages and the natives to expect lower wages.
Introduction to Missionaries and their role in Africa, they themselves saw their role as moderating European commercial excesses.

4. Money Problems
Introduces Richard Burton, who in 1883 arrived in the Gold Coast where he set up a mining venture that was little more than a pyrmid scheme. The Africans, whom he considered himself to be intellectually superior had their comeuppance on him.
Introduces commodities trading, which was a credit system. The Africans traded cowrie shells with each other, that the Westerners considered primative form of bartering. But the Western system of IOUs was not as stable or much different. And the value of a dollar prior to the (US) National Baking Act of 1863 would depend on which bank issued it, the distance to exchange that dollar to that bank etc. Trading in Cowries was common from Zanzibar to the Maldives.
1860s & 1870s, the humanitarians were concerned by cheap imports being dumped in Africa as a result of the Industrial Revolution. Eventually, these so-called concerns led to the withdrawal of indigenous currencies such as the cowrie.

5. Unequal Development
In 1927 R Batten set out for Nigeria with hopes to improve the lives of Africans. His idea rested on two premises: a universalistic understanding of what "economic development" entailed, and a particular idea about the kinds of government that were able to achieve it.
The frustration of Ugandan farmers as the Indians, who were the middlemen and moeylenders.

6. Financing Freedom
1944 Bretton Woods conference, where 44 countries were represented but not any of them present were black Africans. The colonial powers represented the countries in Africa.
In 1960, Egyptian economist Samir Amen arrived in Bamako, Mali. He found that he was struggling against World Bank nonsense and flawed data.

7. Helping You to Get Rich Quick
In 1995, Oxfarm released an annual report calling out the Bretton Woods institutions for their preference for "laissez-faire" policies that promoted trickle-down economies. Market solutions did not solve poverty in a system where state debts made investment in the poor impossible.
Discusses get-rich-quick schemes and crypto.

8. Women are Nothing More than Slaves
Amount the Triv in Nigeria or the Maradi in Niger, it was the man who had to pay to marry a woman (unlike Mr Bennet from Pride & Prejudice who had the "burden" of 5 daughter to marry off). Women were valued in African society unlike pre-Industrial Age Western society.
It was Victorian (western) ideals that separated women's domestic labour from men's that caused inequality.

Epilogue: How to Think Differently About African Economics
Thomas Sankara born in 1949 was the son of a policeman in the French colony then known as Upper Volta (Burkina Faso). He was big in anti-corruption and press freedom. He stated how Africa helped European postwar rebuilding. He also pointed out how aid had kept Africa poor as the leaders who received the aid were prioritising international commitments over domestic.
Overall, a lack of understanding of Africa by Westerners who thought they knew better led to the damage in Africa's economy.

[Theni · Rating 5 out of 5]

So much to learn, so much underlined, so much to revisit. This book resonates even more when you work in the humanitarian/development sector and seeing some of the patterns repeating TODAY. Sending the local to front the operation, short experience in a confined context becoming the blueprint for an African policy, the sheer ignorance that the problem we are trying to solve might have already been solved elsewhere.

I was fascinated about learning about currencies and how they evolved, origin of the modern credit system, hut taxes, and how development was also a way to maintain territory post-Berlin conference. Because the philosophy is - if you are not using it, then its up for the taking. Explains a lot about why people felt they had to "take Africa"

[Marco · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting historical accounts that have provided me with a clearer picture of economic interventions, their underlying misperceptions and detrimental short- and long-term consequences. Writing style was not always the easiest for me (e.g. a lot of „side stories“).

[Gaselen · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good book, exploring interesting perspectives on African economies.

The book is mainly focusing on history and do not dive to deep in economics though