1960s–1990s: (Unsafe Foundations — The Economic Condition of Independent Africa: Cash-Crop Economies Geared Toward Export Rather Than Internal Consumption, M…

1960s–1990s: (Unsafe Foundations — The Economic Condition of Independent Africa: Cash-Crop Economies Geared Toward Export Rather Than Internal Consumption, Marketing Boards Paying Fixed Low Prices While Selling Abroad at Higher Ones, Transport Infrastructure Designed to Link Production to Coast Rather Than Facilitate Internal Development, and Underdevelopment as the Continuation of a Nineteenth-Century Extractive System from Slaves and Ivory to Cotton, Cocoa, and Gold): Arguably the most tangible manifestation of Africa’s problematic inheritances has been the economic condition of much of the continent since the 1960s. Economics lie at the root of many modern political and social crises — a lack of resources, or more commonly an imbalance in their distribution, feeding civil unrest, contributing to the failure of democratic politics, and exacerbating ethnic tensions. Independent Africa inherited the burdens of the cash-crop economy: systems organized around a handful of key commodities geared toward export rather than internal consumption. Colonialism was not concerned with developing internal economic infrastructures or facilitating self-sufficiency — the aim was territories that could pay for themselves through export profits and tax. By the 1950s, the continent’s capacity to produce food for its own consumption was diminishing while cash-crop production increased, creating a rural poverty trap where export production undermined subsistence farming. African producers suffered from heavy taxation that scarcely eased after independence, burdened by marketing boards that paid fixed low prices while selling produce abroad at much higher rates. Transport and communications infrastructure was designed to facilitate colonial exploitation — roads and railways linked production areas to coast, and in a pattern dating to the early nineteenth century, African economies fed external consumption through the export of primary produce, from slaves, ivory, and palm oil in the nineteenth century to cotton, cocoa, and gold in the twentieth. And yet in the 1950s and 1960s there had been reasonable expectations of growth — the postwar boom had seen high prices for cash crops, the West African commercial class was more prosperous than its South Asian equivalent around 1950, and mining was expanding.