Modernization The first Priority
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Modernization--in good measure, the utilization of experimental science and technological proficiency for economic and social development has been a growing preoccupation of Africa's people over the past 150 years, and unquestionably represents for independent Africa today her most compelling priority. Political liberty, for all its appeal, has stood second to the vision of the good life, a life of rising material prosperity. Freedom is hollow that does not bring with it the schooling and the medical services, the better roads and the new housing, the electricity, water, and sewage systems, and by no means the least, those necessary luxuries--motorbikes, cinema, radio, non-essential dress, or an evening's entertainment. Politicians who flourished by bringing their people to independence were not likely to remain long in power if they could not deliver prosperity in the wake of freedom; hence the governments of independent nations have been at once preoccupied with the problems of modernization.
Economic development for Africa, however, presents many difficulties, difficulties, which bear close relationship to the nature of the African environment. Although this environment is often and correctly described in terms Of the caprices of the weather acting on a generally barren land, it is probably the very geniality of Africa's climate, which has constituted a major impediment to progress and growth. Tropical temperatures, lacking a period of winter frost, encourage proliferation of species and heavy population expansion, but the resultant multiplicity of animal and plant life has meant an intense competition for survival and a consequent limit on the numbers and geographic concentration of any particular species. Each organism encourages in its existence a natural enemy which, flourishes by feeding on its victim but which eventually declines in numbers as the population of its prey is destroyed. In Africa, therefore, survival of species ultimately has rested upon small numbers spread over wide areas, and this limitation has applied equally to all. Thus, when man in Africa graduated from hunting and gathering to the stage of cultivation, he was compelled to practice a shifting agriculture and to be content with subsistence production in the face of voracious pests which limited his harvests while he himself continued to endure the lethal and enervating attack of tropical diseases.
During the era of colonial control, the development of modem medicine and scientific agriculture introduced for the first time the possibility of overturning this dismal balance of nature and converting crop production into a major engine for a rising standard of living. Since, throughout the world, economic growth has usually sprung from a base in agriculture, and since today nine out of ten Africans are still farm dwellers, modernization in Africa must first of all achieve a revolution in crop production. Not only is this a shorter route than industry provides toward increasing total exports and building budget surpluses, it also levels the most direct attack on the problem of unemployment while stimulating other sectors of the economy--service industries, transport, and, ultimately, manufacturing.
Realization of the prior claims of agricultural development has not escaped the economic planners either in the colonial or independent African governments, but achievement is beset with complications. Beyond the ecological balance of a tropical environment with its downward-leveling pressures, Africa suffers widely from a thin and infertile soil cover, which is alternately washed away by excessive rains and burned out by a remorseless sun. Further, though generally lacking the conservatism of the peasant with deep attachment to a particular parcel of land, the African farmer is nonetheless hampered by limitations of technique and outlook. The pressures of environment had forced him to adopt a migratory, subsistence cultivation, a system which exploits land instead of improving it, which produces for survival' but nothing more, and which emphasizes security and discourages innovation. Since production even today is linked in the main to local consumption, the concepts of a market economy, of cash crops, the accumulation of surpluses, and production specialization have grown but slowly. Furthermore, traditional patterns of land tenure have militated against the idea of private ownership, thereby inhibiting any tendencies by individual farmers to introduce physical improvements or to invest capital and labor in anticipation of a greater productivity.
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