I've read most of Matt's "Notes on [X]" In general they are well written and interesting. In some cases though it's too simplified and at times insensitive. In particular, I've talked to people who are from Nigeria/Ghana or have visited there and they pointed out issues with his narrative. But most people who read Matt's blog have never been to these places, so they take everything as 100% accurate.
That being said, if you treat it as literally just his experiences, then they're fantastic reads.
> I've talked to people who are from Nigeria/Ghana or have visited there and they pointed out issues with his narrative. But most people who read Matt's blog have never been to these places, so they take everything as 100% accurate.
It's interesting that people read a blog by a someone who visited for 10 days, instead of someone who has lived there their entire lives or otherwise has far more experience.
The author even starts by disclaiming interest in calling them by their name or good knowledge of their language (French), showing that he doesn't seem to consider the impression that gives to readers.
(Note – The Ivory Coast is so French in culture and temperament that it insists on officially being called “Côte d’Ivoire.” But I don’t know how to make that accent on my keyboard and I don’t feel like copy-and-pasting the name over-and-over, so I’m just going to call it the “Ivory Coast.”)
> It's interesting that people read a blog by a someone who visited for 10 days, instead of someone who has lived there their entire lives or otherwise has far more experience.
Because they found the one and not the other. Matt Lakeman is someone whose blog I follow; if he posts something I'm going to read it. A number of other people found this because it was on HN. It's not like I decided "I will learn about Ghana!", searched, looked over the results, found both Lakeman and some Ghanaian writer among them, and decided to go with the former over the latter; I encountered Lakeman's post, and have not encountered any Ghanaian writers writing about Ghana among the places I usually read.
And like, let's be honest -- I'm just not interested enough in Ghana to go searching out writing on the history of Ghana and find the best one. The realistic alternative to me reading Matt Lakeman on the history of Ghana isn't that I read someone else on the history of Ghana, it's that I don't read about the history of Ghana at all, because the topic doesn't even occur to me as something to read about!
> The Ivory Coast is so French in culture and temperament that it insists on officially being called “Côte d’Ivoire.”
What a weird comment. The French couldn't care less how foreigners call us, and we don't pretend we can choose the name of France in any other language than French. Most other languages have they own name for France.
I think he meant simply that they still have a strong cultural allegiance to France and thus prefer the French spelling of the name (despite having been independent for quite some time). Not that that preference (or insistence on it) is in itself representative of French culture.
1. Nobody thinks reading a blog from a guy whom visited for 10 days is better than info from someone whom lives there. Who exactly is this straw man "reader" you've created?
2. "disclaiming interest in calling them by their name... " Excuse me? Do you have a bone to pick, what even are you trying to say here? You want the author to speak French before writing the blog post?
3. I am a reader and did not get any negative impression from his quip about not knowing where the accent key is, what are you even going on about?
Using the preferred name for people and places is a fairly basic sign of respect (at least in my cultural bubble). It would have taken the author literally 30 seconds to do a find-and-replace at the end of writing his article to fix this.
So a French blog on the US would have to replace Etas Unis with The USA? An American blog would have to replace “Germany” with “Deutchland” and a German block would have to type cote de ivorie rather than Elfenbeinküste?
No one has to do anything, that's not how politeness works. You choose yourself whatever is most reasonable to you.
The situation is not quite analogous however, since Germans generally don't mind us calling their country "Germany" (I have never heard of any dislike of the name) whereas (quoting from Wikipedia)
> Therefore, in April 1986, the government declared that Côte d'Ivoire (or, more fully, République de Côte d'Ivoire) would be its formal name for the purposes of diplomatic protocol and has since officially refused to recognize any translations from French to other languages in its international dealings. Despite the Ivorian government's request, the English translation "Ivory Coast" (often "the Ivory Coast") is still frequently used in English by various media outlets and publications.
Its similar to nicknames with real people. Some people don't mind having their name shortened or adapted however people like, while others people really don't like nicknames. You use nicknames with the first group and call the second group by their formal names.
That's sort of my point. The Spanish words "Costa Rica" and the French words "Côte d'Ivoire" have the same status in English - they're each the preferred name for the respective place.
Yes, I thought these notes sometimes omit important bits as well. As a native Ghanaian, this was my comment on his notes on Ghana, which I posted before on HN:
> I'd say the article omitted the animus towards Nkrumah from the UGCC (his former party). This opposition was manifested in their attempts to derail his rule from independence to his overthrow (there is some evidence they were in cahoots with the CIA et. al). Thus, the popular reactions to Nkrumah's policies were not only based on their merits. Most Ghanaians actually think pretty well of Nkrumah's development trajectory.
This opposition, which forms the basis of one of Ghana’s main political lineages, called the UP tradition, is partly tribal in motivation. The Akans (the main ethnic group, who mostly support the UP tradition) see themselves as the central core of the nation, but their allegiance is mostly to the King. They have this sense of needing to take back control of the country, similar to the way white Americans might feel threatened by a supposed loss of control to minorities. But while the Akans have a can-do attitude, they are usually not good administrators and planners.
So I'd say this rivalry, based on resentment of the initial success of Nkrumah’s tradition in particular, and resentment of uppity minority ethnic groups in general, is a major factor in Ghana's perennial inability to realize its full potential.
This factor in Ghana's politics continues down to this day. Rawlings’ was a Ewe, as the article notes, and his (P)NDC was the third major political lineage in Ghana (after the UP and Nkrumah’s CPP). The UP tradition was again a thorn in their flesh, even before multi-party democracy was restored. The current president (from this same political lineage) is hated by many for taking the country back to a period of massive corruption and economic malaise. I'm not too political, but I tend to agree; he gives off the air of a 70s era politician, radically unprepared to lead a 21st century country, very corrupt, intolerant of criticism, not in control of things, and afraid of a coup. Many Ghanaians would claim that he was elected primarily based on support emanating from this conflict, and not because of demonstrating any competence.
You speak of not being political, yet your comment seems to lean in a certain direction. I also find your description of Akans quite disingenuous - you claim they are usually not good administrators or planners - how are you measuring the group's competency in these areas?
I spent a month exploring all over the Ivory Coast, driving my own 4x4 [1].
When I give talks about my 3 years driving right around Africa I use Ivory Coast as the example of road conditions. A road where trucks were stuck for two weeks [2], potholes and broken pavement so bad I was in first gear for days, and then some of the best freeways on the entire continent. All in the same country, sometimes only hours apart.
The story of the The Basilica of Yamoussoukro [3] is insane. It's the world's biggest Catholic monument, costing around $600 million USD. The final cost doubled Ivory Coast’s national debt. Seriously.
Before the Pope would sanction such a thing, he insisted a hospital also be built to help the citizens of the country. Strangely enough after the Pope visited the Basilica and gave his blessing, the hospital was never finished, and still sits half finished, closed.
Interesting thread related to Ivory Coast's lack of production, specifically how most Vietnam and Ivory Coast grow a similar amount of cashews, but most Ivorian cashews end up in Vietnam due to a lack of processing capacity in Ivory Coast - https://twitter.com/yarbatman/status/1736038330251329939
If you find that interesting, you may want to look into why Switzerland is the 2nd largest exporter of coffee in the world, despite never growing a single bean [1].
The powers that be absolutely will not allow countries like Ethiopia to process the coffee they grow any more than they will allow Ivory Coast to process cashews.
> The powers that be absolutely will not allow countries like Ethiopia to process the coffee
Yeah....no.
Ethiopia doesn't do processing because there isn't enough capital or stability to justify a multimillion investment in processing.
Vietnam was in the same position developmentally as Ethiopia today in the 1990s, but had a relatively stable government that began working on expanding credit and entrepreneurship.
Ethiopia literally had a civil war barely a year ago, a massive civil war in the 90s, and multiple insurgencies in between.
Maybe it's both. Western countries have long protected their domestic agricultural industries (while calling for free trade for the products they want to export).
How does it explain Kenya, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Tanzania's foray into food production?
There just isn't capital in Ethiopia. It's literally one of the least developed countries on earth.
The country had a civil war from 1974-1991 that killed 1.7 million people, a civil war/war of independence by Eritrea from 1961-1991 that killed 225k people, a second war with Eritrea from 1998-2000 that killed 300-500k people, a civil war from 2020 to today that has killed around 200k-600k people, 2 wars with Somalia that killed 35k people, and a number of ethnic insurgencies
In 2000, it's HDI was 0.292 and in 2021 it barely reached 0.498, which is where Vietnam was in the 90s and barely above Afghanistan and the DRC (I'd have compared Ethiopian numbers from the 90s but those don't exist due to the wars above). It's human capital is some of the least developed in the world.
They will get more development in food processing (and in general) because the UAE has been cultivating Abiy, but out of all commodities producers, they are one of the less developed ones.
> protected their domestic agricultural industries
Not at the processing level. Domestic agricultural tariffs are meant to protect commodity prices for farmers, not the processing capacity.
Most low level food processing is now Asian and Brazilian, with multibillion conglomerates like CP Group (Thailand), IndoFood (Indonesia), Mayora (Indonesia), Golden Hope (Malaysia), Kulim (Malaysia), ITC (India), Hindustan Unilever (India), COFCO (China), Foshan Haitian (China), and dozens of SOEs from those countries.
You need an industrial base to process food at an industrial scale.
Defending your own agricultural manufacturing makes sense - you want your people to be able to eat + not have risks related to other counries/ politics/ transport.
There are lots of risks, and those are not at all the largest ones. The entire world relies on international agricultural trade and it's never been better fed.
One reason is that the resources are much greater - if one place has a bad year, another can have a good year. Also, each location can produce what it does best, what its land, capital, skills, and infrastructure best support. Then other locations do what they do best, and we get the most economical, the best of everything.
Economic nationalism is, among other things, a ruse by some businesses to monopolize markets (not having competition) and get subsidized by the public.
After they expelled the French and Americans, and then the Eastern Bloc collapsed, they were relatively free of foreign influence to develop their country as they saw fit.
And invited them back with the Moi reforms in 1986.
> relatively free of foreign influence
They got a massive FDI influx from Singapore, Thailand, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and China - especially after China began boycotting Korean, Japanese, and Taiwanese firms in the 2013-2017 period.
This is why VN's first SEZ (Vietnam-Singapore Industrial Park) was devoted to food processing.
A leadership crisis has also been brewing in the VCP for that reason, as the Southern cadre leans pro-SK and the Northern cadre leans pro-PRC.
The difference is CdI had a destructive civil war from 2004 to 2011, and failed political and economic institutions in the 1980s and 1990s. Félix Houphouët-Boigny created a command economy that rested on commodity extraction (yes, command economies aren't only a Communist thing).
On the other hand, countries like Vietnam, China, India, Malaysia, Indonesia, and South Korea listened to the IMF in the 1990s and worked on reforming institutions.
CdI's economy only recently started to get on track after Ouattara came to power. It didn't hurt that he is an actual trained economist who has worked at the IMF and WB.
> being adjacent to PRC
French investment in the CdI in the 1960-70s is similar to Chinese and Korean investment in Vietnam in 2023, and American, Japanese, and Korean investment in China in the 1990s and 2000s
The PRC's GDP per Capita didn't catch up to CdI until 2005 when their civil war entered full gear.
The only difference is CdI's institutional capacity was crap compared to plenty of similarly poor Asian countries in the 1990s (China, Vietnam, India)
The Phillipines is a similar story as well btw. In 1990 Phillipines and Turkiye had the same standard of living. In 2023, Türkiye's HDI caught up with Hungary and most of Central Europe, while Phillipines fell behind Vietnam and Indonesia - two countries that have historically been much poorer than PH.
> The powers that be absolutely will not allow countries like Ethiopia to process the coffee they grow any more than they will allow Ivory Coast to process cashews.
While there are still remnants of colonialism at play, in theory capitalism would prefer to do processing as near to production as possible... but that's hard to do in Ethiopia or most other African countries with a really unreliable electricity grid [1]. Ivory Coast has it different - they massively built out power generation [2], but it takes time and money for investments into processing facilities flow in.
Additionally, political stability is one of the largest issues impeding many African countries. Many of them are actively at war, undergo civil war or separatist movements, are governed by dictators or went through prolonged periods of instability. All of this isn't exactly helpful when looking for investors that have to invest millions of dollars up-front - investors want the guarantee that there won't be some government nationalizing away their investment or war destroying it.
Why don't you specifically name these "powers that be" and show some evidence for their meddling? In reality, nobody's really stopping countries from doing these things locally except the economic dynamics of a given industry and their own bad internal policies. Contrary examples of countries bootstrapping themselves into enough sucess to make their economies more advanced for large investments in sophisticated crop and other industries abound.
Your vague claim about the powers that be is (I suspect) a common and popular leftist trope even today that a vast global, neocolonial conspiracy of mysterious western power centers crushes the poor helpless third world into oppresion at every turn and is responsible for its many dysfunctions, while often conveniently ignoring contrary examples of success stories or internal sources of fault and problems.
A curious detail of this notion is just how implicitly condescending its proponents assumptions about agency and self-administration with people and institutions in these developing country are.
This sounds like conspiracy theory. Plenty of "countries like Ethiopia" were able to bootstrap their economy since the 1950s, conditional on providing stable environment for investors.
You yourself wouldn't invest your own money into an authoritarian country with an unreliable power grid and a penchant for useless wars, civil or external. Well, other people think along the same lines. No need to drag sinister powers that be into the calculation.
Excellent read so far (I'm about a quarter way through). I think I've found a minor error:
> To the Ivory Coast’s west, Ghana went from one of the best African economies to one of the worst, culminating in the overthrow of Kwame Nkrumah in 1968. Farther west, Togo, Benin, and Nigeria...
He mentions that it is 'literally impossible' to get a tourist visa other than by coming through the airport in Abidjan. Yet, in 2023 I did get one outside of Côte d'Ivoir, at the Ivorian consulate in Freetown, Sierra Leone.
This is one of the most well-written and well-researched historical narratives I have ever read. As one of the Wordpress comments suggested, I would be an instant subscriber to a Patreon to incentivize future writing projects (in case the original author ever reads this).
I'm also quite inspired to visit the Ivory Coast for myself and see the giant basilica in Yamoussoukro. Perhaps in the modern age, "corruption tourism" will help bolster these types of places.
A fantastically written article, which goes well into depth on the history of the Ivory Coast and its erstwhile "benevolent" dictator. Worth an hour if you have one.
To me, though, he seems to adopt the usual sophomoric mistaken approach of identifying the cause of a calamity in many different places, which is what I did in my IB extended essay about the fall of Suharto in Indonesia. Now I feel a little embarrassed looking back on this: I was trying too hard not to be wrong, and covering all of my bases in accordance. Of course, that was sixteen years ago, and I was in high school.
In so doing, he buried what seems like the biggest mistake at the end: Côte d'Ivoire bled its own economy nearly to death when cacao prices collapsed in the '80s by internally subsidizing exports of its theretofore most profitable crop. Then they killed the whole industry while trying to set up a cacao OPEC, forgetting that it would be a lot easier for rich countries to just go without chocolate than to live without oil. Sure, war and corruption are bad, but plenty of countries had better performance despite them than CdI did during its long fall. In some sense, the logical comparison is Venezuela's self-sabotaging response to the PDVSA strike of 2002 [1].
It's also another case study in the enduring power of roads: for all the mistakes, CdI built the best road network in West Africa, and those roads are mostly still there, probably helping propel its recent recovery at a faster pace than its neighbors. Almost like a tiny Rome.
> Then they killed the whole industry while trying to set up a cacao OPEC, forgetting that it would be a lot easier for rich countries to just go without chocolate than to live without oil.
The rich countries didn't go without chocolate: other cacao producers were more than happy to pick up the slack and collect the extra profits.
OPEC is remarkable mostly as a rare example of a successful international cartel, and even then
its history is riven with constant squabbles, sales off the books etc, and these days it's a shadow of its former self because Russia and now the US (thanks fracking) don't play ball.
While Russia hasn't been a part of OPEC, so wouldn't be the cause of OPEC only now failing to maintain a cartel, it's important context to know that Russia and OPEC frequently collude on oil price manipulation together via OPEC+.
For example, last month: "Oil prices edged higher on Monday after top exporters Saudi Arabia and Russia reaffirmed their commitment to extra voluntary oil supply cuts until the end of the year."
Matt Lakeman's "Notes on $PLACE" have become my favorite random email update to get. They're all excellent. If anyone knows more about him (does he write anywhere else?), would love to learn more about his background and travel experiences.
> To spoil the story a bit, the Ivory Coast descended into an ethnic/religious civil war that killed thousands and displaced hundreds of thousands in less than a decade after FHB’s death. An incredible amount of the contemporary accounts attribute the prior ethnic/religious peace of the Ivory Coast to FHB personally
Sounds like Yugoslavia to me. Minus the balkanization and the tidal forces of EU.
> he was massively corrupt and likely looted billions of dollars from the Ivory Coast.
Funnily enough, we never seem to see any track of these money over and over again (and such stories are aplenty), and especially not in the hands of that dictator's children, clan or followers. Leading to suspicion that it is not "looting" but maybe the old colonial power using the local quasi-independent government to siphon money out of their former properties. This way, these dictators have to send money back to the mother ship, "or else"; themselves getting peanuts - but at least after hedonistically partying in Paris.
You know that specific game mechanic if you ever played the original Dune from 1992.
An counterexample to this rule (that confirms its existence) is Dos Santos' daughter who exists, owns significant capital, and is a target of boring stuff such as lawsuits. This is opposed to when these billions simply disappear for good.
> Leading to suspicion that it is not "looting" but maybe the old colonial power using the local quasi-independent government to siphon money out of their former properties.
France has many other investment options with much better expected returns, especially once you account for the cost of maintaining a military presence. There is much to criticize about recent French policy in Africa, but charges that the French government is cynically enriching itself by exploiting these countries just don't match observable reality; talking with people who have spent time working there will quickly confirm. Additional evidence comes from China's attempts to enrich itself in Africa, which have mostly failed to produce the desired riches in the expected amounts.
So it's just malicious incompetence, not even greed? There has to be a reason it seems former french colonies are never allowed to become stable. Just coup after coup, with French forces usually directly involved.
France literally made Haiti pay them reparations for…revolting against their slave colony. There seems to be no low they won’t stoop to for extra bucks!
This is a disingenious comment, imo. The payment you are referring to payed in the early 1800:s.
>France demanded payment from Haiti for recognition of its independence in the early 19th century. The demand for reparations was made shortly after Haiti declared independence in 1804 following a successful revolt against French colonial rule. The negotiations and the subsequent agreement for reparations occurred between 1825 and 1838.
I thought Haiti was still paying until the 20th century? This is from Wikipedia:
> The first annual payment alone was six times Haiti's annual revenue.[1] The payment was later reduced to 90 million francs in 1838, equivalent to $32,535,940,803 in 2022, with Haiti paying about 112 million francs in total.[3] Over the 122 years between 1825 and 1947, the debt severely hampered Haitian economic development as payments of interest and downpayments totaled a significant share of Haitian GDP, constraining the use of domestic financial funds for infrastructure and public services.
The notion of dictators looting a significant sum of money then getting to keep and use it does not match the observable reality either, so we have to keep looking.
Swiss bank accounts are not designed to store billions of 1973 dollars. Grand mansions do not cost anything near billions of dollars. The huge monuments are embezzlement at best, bad invesment more likely.
Billions of dollars would allow them to own serious chunks of First World industry, have stuff such as investment funds or charity non-profits. That's a different kind of money.
> The Balkan country was “liberated” by communists, either by the Soviet army (which didn’t give a shit about them)
This is measured, I presuppose, in comparsion with the Old Europe with its uncanny taste for all countries outside the Old Europe, though, sometimes they do devour each other as well.
Great article. Almost long enough to be in The New Yorker /s
> By 1968, there were 48 cinemas in the Ivory Coast. In my own experience, cinemas are still quite rare in West Africa. I almost went to one in the Ivory Coast, but I didn’t want to see anything that was playing.
All those Nollywood films! They can't all be for export.
The Area Handbooks the author mentions sound fascinating. I see little information online about them from my cursory search but see a few used copies available. Historical accounts such as those are a treasure trove of fun reading, at least to me.
..."It was established to cultivate a Francophilic loyal class of intellectual and political elites"...
Weird how it's not polite to write about the indoctrination aspect of modern western schooling...
Also astonished at the anglo refusal to acknowledge any other languages and orthographies exist. You are not being cute when you refuse to even try to correctly reproduce "those weird apostrophes and accents" or when you "apologize for butchering the pronunciation!"
> how are there no successful post-colonial African countries?
> Despite giving me Marxist vibes
So the author is ideologically opposed to the type of economics that is precisely concerned with this sort of analysis? I stopped reading here, I don’t need analysis from those who believe in fables of invisible hands and shy away from any analysis that could be considered to bite it!
That being said, if you treat it as literally just his experiences, then they're fantastic reads.
P.S. His notes on Mauritania [https://mattlakeman.org/2023/08/16/notes-on-mauritania/] is really interesting for the train story. I had never heard of such a thing before.