Bloomberg has a book review that claims, yet again, that what prevents African countries from developing is neopatrimonialism. Neopatrimonialism is a political structure where a network of patron-client relationships turn the political competition for control of the state into a zero-sum game between rival networks who flow the benefits of the state down the network. It is a pretty typical system, Mexican politics works this way, for example. The best way to know you are dealing with neopatrimonialism is when it is not what you do but who you know that allows you to provide for your family and advance your career. To a Western meritocratic society, neopatrimonialism is corrupt.
Neopatrimonialism is not the only or even the greatest determinant for the lack of development in Africa. I highly recommend Jeffry Herbst’s, States and Power in Africa, for a very insightful analysis of the challenges posed by geography in Africa and the continuities with the pre-colonial past and the legacy of colonialism. From the pre-colonial past, he determines that Africa has always been sparsely populated and poor due to the generally inhospitable environment in many parts of Africa. For example, trypanosomiasis in the lowlands of East Africa prevent the domestication and use of horses, as well as being life threatening to humans. The Sahel with its periods of drought cause crop failures, desiccation of pastures, and induce the usual response of populations to environmental degradation: migration. However mass migrations are anathema to nation-states.
From the colonial period, the “colonialism on the cheap” left most new states in Africa without a developed infrastructure to project governmental authority into the hinterland. Combine that with difficult and challenging geographies–for example, large hinterlands–add in multiple ethnicities and religions and you get insurgencies, since the state is unable to extend its monopoly on violence to the hinterlands and exert political control. Only the settler colonies, where large white minorities settled, do you have the infrastructure to permit state control, such as South Africa, Botswana, and Zimbabwe.
We are finding that fault line wars, wars of identity between rival civilizations, are particularly a problem at the southern margins of Islamic Africa. There is a low level conflict in Kenya and outright war in the Central African Republic, Nigeria, and Mali. The division of Sudan was an attempt by the international community to create a more stable configuration, sort of like the carving up of India into India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.