Matthew Parris writes eloquently about the role of Christianity in African development:

In the city we had working for us Africans who had converted and were strong believers. The Christians were always different.

Far from having cowed or confined its converts, their faith appeared to have liberated and relaxed them. There was a liveliness, a curiosity, an engagement with the world – a directness in their dealings with others – that seemed to be missing in traditional African life. They stood tall.

His point is that a traditional passive ‘tribal’ mind is Africa’s main problem:

But let me try an example: the answer given by Sir Edmund Hillary to the question: Why climb the mountain? “Because it’s there,” he said.

To the rural African mind, this is an explanation of why one would not climb the mountain. It’s… well, there. Just there. Why interfere? Nothing to be done about it, or with it. Hillary’s further explanation – that nobody else had climbed it – would stand as a second reason for passivity.

The answer?

Christianity, post-Reformation and post-Luther, with its teaching of a direct, personal, two-way link between the individual and God, unmediated by the collective, and unsubordinate to any other human being, smashes straight through the philosphical/spiritual framework I’ve just described.

… Those who want Africa to walk tall amid 21st-century global competition must not kid themselves that providing the material means or even the knowhow that accompanies what we call development will make the change. A whole belief system must first be supplanted.

But what if in some way the rest of us can not fathom, Africa as a space just does not want to be liberated to walk tall amid global competition, or at least is impervious to any attempt to liberate it?

What if Africa’s problem is that we think Africa has a problem?

A senior anti-apartheid intellectual/activist once told me that one of the best-kept secrets of the anti-apartheid struggle was the fact that apartheid had – through its massive policies of enforced ‘separate development’ – kept alive lots of African traditions and attitudes which otherwise would have been lost to pell-mell modernity. A precious legacy.

Our old friend time-scale again.

Which is more likely?

That in 50,000 years’ time New York and Beijing and London will be glorious cities, full of clever and successful human beings?

Or that somewhere in a warm spot a simple man will be sitting under a tree in what a long-lost civilisation called Tanzania, gazing contentedly at Mt Kilimanjaro because it is just there?