Why did countries such as Japan, Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam industrialise with remarkable speed while much of sub-Saharan Africa struggles to achieve comparable transformation?
Standard explanations often point to culture, geography, colonialism or governance. Yet these explanations frequently overlook a more fundamental issue: the difference between adopting the symbols of modernity and building the capabilities that sustain it.
The source of the development divergence between Africa and Asia lies in the distinction between what may be called hard modernisation and soft Westernisation.
Hard modernisation is the acquisition of productive capability. It involves mastering science, engineering and industry. It is primarily the capacity to produce, maintain, adapt and even improve modern products and institutions. Soft Westernisation, by contrast, emphasises appearances: Western lifestyles, Western consumption patterns and Western cultural imitation more generally, without the corresponding productive transformation.
We should note here that African historiography identifies two schools of thought on the impact of the West on Africa. The epic school argues that the West’s impact has been of epic proportions: deep and wide-ranging, as measured by religious, linguistic and educational indicators. Those colonial years, despite their brevity, were truly exceptional.
The episodic school argues that the postcolonial period illustrates how shallow the impact of European colonialism was. The colonial period was just an episode in relation to the millennia of African history. That is why Western ideas and institutions failed to take root in Africa.
I hasten to argue that there should be a third, hybrid school that simply posits that the West’s impact on Africa is deep culturally (soft Westernisation) and shallow technologically (hard modernisation). This distinction helps us to understand how societies exposed to similar global forces produce radically different developmental outcomes.
The experience of Meiji Japan (1869-1912) illustrates this clearly. Faced with Western military and technological might in the mid-19th century, Japan did not merely imitate Western culture. It strategically sought to acquire the technical foundations of power — what we have called above hard modernisation. Education was reoriented towards science and engineering.
Students were sent abroad to acquire practical expertise. Foreign specialists were invited to train Japanese counterparts. Technical books were rapidly translated into Japanese so that knowledge could be domesticated and disseminated widely.
Equally important, the Japanese state aligned incentives with national developmental goals, allowing engineers, technicians and industrial planners to gain prestige and influence in society. Advancement increasingly depended on technical competence rather than cultural imitation alone.
The result was the emergence of a new elite capable of building industries, managing infrastructure and reproducing foreign technologies domestically.
Within a few decades, Japan transformed itself from a vulnerable feudal society into a major industrial and military power.
Much of Africa’s encounter with modernity unfolded at about the same time as Japan’s but under very different conditions. Colonial institutions were designed primarily for political control and economic extraction rather than indigenous industrial development.
Colonial education systems therefore focused largely on producing clerks, interpreters, teachers and administrators who could operate the machinery of colonial governance. Mastery of European languages and administrative norms offered the greatest opportunities for advancement. Technical and industrial education remained limited.
Under such conditions, Africans responded rationally to the incentives before them. Cultural and linguistic assimilation yielded social mobility, while technical capability often offered fewer rewards. Over time, this produced postcolonial elites who were often more culturally Westernised than technically industrialised. The process of decolonisation, too, was the process of replacing the Western ‘other’ with the Westernised ‘self’.
The consequences of this dynamic remain visible today. Many African societies display the outward symbols of modernity — glass buildings, imported technologies, Western-style universities and urban consumer culture — and yet heavy dependence on external sources for industrial goods, maintenance systems and technological innovation persists.
Let me illustrate this with a powerful example from the late pan-Africanist intellectual Ali Mazrui. In his 1986 documentary The Africans: A Triple Heritage, Mazrui walks into what he describes as an expensive hotel in West Africa.
At first glance, everything appears modern. The building looks impressive. The room is well furnished and carries all the outward symbols of modernity. But then something interesting happens. Mazrui begins to interact with the environment. He tries to turn on the radio. It does not work. He walks into the bathroom. The cold-water tap works but the hot-water tap is not connected at all. There is no pipe. He returns to the bedroom, finds a note encouraging guests to report problems and picks up the phone to call reception. The phone is dead.
At that moment, Mazrui turns to the camera and rhetorically asks: “We have acquired Western tastes … but have we acquired Western skills?”
This episode in Mazrui’s documentary is not merely an anecdote. It is a diagnosis. What is actually happening in that room is this: the objects are present but the system is not functional. The form exists, but the underlying capability is missing. Consumption is visible but production and maintenance are absent. The form of modernity exists; the underlying systems that sustain it do not. Mazrui called the whole phenomenon “Westernisation without modernisation”.
What about the divergence between sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia?
At independence, the two regions shared many similarities. Apart from their topography and climate, both occupied similarly peripheral positions in the global economy. Both depended heavily on primary commodity exports. Both experienced authoritarian rule, corruption and weak institutions. Countries such as Indonesia and Nigeria experienced similar histories of long military rule and resource dependence.
In 1960, Southeast Asians were, on average, poorer than sub-Saharan Africans in terms of per capita income. By 1980, Southeast Asians had caught up with Africa. By 2010, Southeast Asians were, on average, wealthier than Africans. In the 2020s, the per capita income of Southeast Asians was more than three times higher than that of sub-Saharan Africans.
In short, poverty declined dramatically across much of Southeast Asia. It remains widespread in much of Africa.
The great divergence in development between Africa and Asia became visible not only in manufacturing but also in agriculture. Indonesia emerged as one of the world’s leading cocoa producers despite entering the sector decades after Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana.
Vietnam became one of the world’s leading coffee exporters despite entering large-scale coffee production only recently, leaving Ethiopia, the historical birthplace of coffee, in fifth place.
Part of the explanation for this divergence lies in the differing priorities in the developmental strategies of the two regions.
In Southeast Asia, governing elites pursued pro-poor, pro-agriculture and pro-rural-development strategies before full industrial take-off. In other words, agricultural productivity, export competitiveness and rural welfare were prioritised.
The logic behind Southeast Asia’s approach is simple arithmetic: the most effective way to increase incomes quickly on a large scale in an underdeveloped economy dominated by peasant agriculture is to invest in enabling smallholder farmers to raise their productivity and sell more of what they produce. By contrast, many African states pursued prestige-oriented urban modernisation and import-substitution policies while neglecting agriculture and rural society.
The outcome in many sub-Saharan African countries has been what is called “mal-modernisation”: urbanisation without industrialisation; Western tastes without Western skills; Western consumption patterns without Western production technics; and a Western culture of letters without a Western culture of numbers.
In other words, what prevented most African countries from performing as well as most Asian countries in economic modernisation is connected with Africa’s “soft Westernisation”.
Yet the broader lesson is not that Africa should mechanically imitate Asia. Historical circumstances differ. What the experiences of Meiji Japan and Southeast Asia suggest is that successful modernisation depends fundamentally on the alignment of institutions, incentives and learning towards capability-building — hard modernisation.
True, Africa under colonialism was inserted into a global system that did not require it to become a technological producer. Africa also did not have a say on what type of knowledge to import. This does not, nevertheless, mean that the postcolonial African leadership should be let off the hook for the lack of progress after decolonisation.
Seifudein Adem is a visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Research and Education, Doshisha University, Kyoto, Japan.
What has prevented most African countries from performing as well as Japan, Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam in economic modernisation is connected with the continent’s ‘soft Westernisation’, focused mainly on appearance