Abstract
Dawid Fourie arrived on 24 November 2021, a first-born son to Helanya and Johan Fourie. It was an inauspicious start. On that day, South African scientists reported a new variant of the Covid-19 virus, Omicron. The backlash was immediate. The world locked South Africa out, cancelling flights and bookings on the eve of what we had hoped would be a busy tourist summer. On top of this, the country was still reeling from the impact of violent protests in KwaZulu-Natal a few months earlier. Hope of a quick recovery had faded. The minus 7% growth in 2020 was South Africa’s worst in a century. There was much to be pessimistic about.
And yet Dawid was born at a time which is, despite all the bad news, the best in history. Let us take just one measure of a good life: life expectancy. The average South African boy born in 2019, the most recent period for which I could find data, could expect to live to 61,5 years, or 65,7 years if fortunate enough to be born in the Western Cape. A girl could expect to live about six years longer. This is much longer than our ancestors lived only a few generations ago. Averages, of course, mask large differences between South Africans. But the point remains for all subdivisions: across race, class, gender and geography, South Africans are living longer than at any time in the country’s history.
Economic history gives us the benefit of the long-run view. It helps us ask the right questions. Instead of ‘Why are we poor?’, we ask the more historically accurate question, ‘Why are we so remarkably rich?’ or ‘Why do we live so much longer than our ancestors?’
Asking these questions does not mean we have solved the dual economic problems of production and distribution and that we can now rest on our laurels. We have much still to do. Life expectancy in South Africa is at the low end of the global distribution. While women’s average life expectancy in South Africa is 68 years, according to the World Bank, it is 78 in Morocco and Mexico, 80 in Argentina and Ecuador, and 84 in Portugal and Slovenia. Clearly we can do better.
Aiming to do better does not mean that things will inevitably get better. South African men achieved a life expectancy of 60 years in 1990, but by 2005 the HIV/Aids epidemic had reduced it to 51. The recovery since then is due to the extraordinary success of antiretroviral drugs − advances in medicine being one of the reasons why our lives today are so much better than only one or two generations ago.
Despite many wrong turns in South Africa’s long walk to economic freedom, we have undeniably moved forward. This progress is the consequence of two beliefs: that we should use our knowledge of nature, or what we might call science and technology, to make us more productive and so raise our standard of living. The second belief is that the benefits of this rising productivity should not be limited to an elite but shared by ordinary people.
We can see the results of the first belief throughout South African history, from learning to work iron, to adopting maize as a crop, to introducing new forms of money – all of which happened before the arrival of Europeans. New technologies were also adopted in the eighteenth century when Europeans settled the southern tip of the continent, creating a level of prosperity that was among the highest in the world at the time. And innovation continued during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, accelerating South Africa’s walk towards economic freedom.
But our progress has been hampered by one major failing. The sad truth is that the second belief, that increasing productivity should benefit all, has only very recently been embraced. Put differently, until 1994 the majority of South Africans were, at best, observers of South Africa’s long walk. The good news is that many have now joined in. The bad news is that, for a variety of reasons, many are still only limping along.
To tell this story of South Africa’s long walk to economic freedom, I have chosen to use the family history of the Fouries, of whom Dawid represents the 11th generation. It will indeed be a personal journey. I will draw on chapters from my book, Our Long Walk to Economic Freedom, which spells out many of the lessons economic historians have learned in studying the progress of humankind over the millennia. And I will use the methods that my colleagues, my students and I use at the Laboratory for the Economics of Africa’s Past (LEAP), the research unit I coordinate in the Economics Department.
As I follow my family through South African history, I use a variety of quantitative sources: university records, death notices, voter records, limited liability company records, attestation records, tax records, probate inventories, to name just a few. Using such records, I argue that the economist and the quantitative social science historian have the means to open up ‘histories from below’. We want to answer the question: What gives ordinary people agency to build better lives, and what denies them the freedom to do so? But our ambition goes beyond simply answering the question: we want not only to describe the long walk to economic freedom but ultimately to advance it.
Keywords: Afrikaner history; economic development; genealogy; wealth creation
- The featured image of this article is a compilition of two images available on Pixabay: an illustration by Peggy and Marco Lachmann-Anke, and a design by Kurious.
Lees die volledige artikel in Afrikaans
Suid-Afrika se lang tog na ekonomiese vryheid: ’n Persoonlike reis