'A unique view of our world'

Judge Johann Kriegler reviews 'Skatryk', the Afrikaans edition of 'Our Long Walk to Economic Freedom'

I thank Johann Kriegler for this insightful review of Skatryk, the Afrikaans edition of Our Long Walk to Economic Freedom. Kriegler is a retired justice of the Constitutional Court of South Africa. In December 1993, he was appointed Chairperson of the Independent Electoral Commission whose task it was to deliver South Africa's first elections based on universal adult suffrage.

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Judging by the front and back cover teasers, we are dealing with a formidable book here. J.P. Landman says it’s one of the most impressive he has ever read; Waldimar Pelser appreciates the author as both interesting and important; the publisher wants it to be a fresh African perspective by an internationally esteemed professor of economics, who is also a popular column writer for Rapport.

No matter how generously discounted, these claims befuddle a balanced review from the outset. Moreover, the first English-language version already found great acclaim two years ago. Where is the critic who will not be either intimidated or hyper-skeptical? This work is reviewed here from a lay perspective, not expertly.

Skatryk is not a brick of a book – a modest 216 pages of text, conveniently divided into 35 short chapters, each with a catchy title and an easily digestible topic, and then a summarising closing thought. The endnotes are insightful, the index seemingly comprehensive and useful, the text otherwise accessible at a lay level in a comfortable conversational style with, thankfully, consistently simple terminology. Some graphs are a bit small and opaque for old eyes, but one has become accustomed to such price-driven shortcomings.

The author is certainly an entertaining lecturer – he communicates relaxedly, explains professional concepts in a pleasingly non-didactic way, and introduces them methodically to keep pace with non-specialists’ understanding.

Especially striking is the lecturer’s ability to detect the connection between seemingly unrelated matters, almost a sort of metacognition, which testifies to an overarching understanding of the data and the consequent ability to detect correlations and – often more importantly – to identify the causal link, if any, between different factors in a half-Socratic manner along with the reader.

He enjoys playing with seemingly totally unrelated matters to reveal underlying truths by identifying an underlying and highly meaningful connection. So, for example, in chapter 17, he asks why the Basotho did not like trains and then explains how crucial rail and other transport links can be for a community’s economy. Although it was a relative stone’s throw from Basotholand to Kimberley, the Basotho’s agricultural products could not compete price-wise in this favourable seller’s market with imports from as far as Australia.

A more tentalising example is the well-known contrast between the dowry of Indians (and indeed others) and the lobola of Africans: One’s ‘bait’ is the other’s ‘purchase price’. At first glance, a comparison of these two historically, culturally, and geographically distant communities has little value, but as he analyses the two socio-economic contexts, it becomes clear how and why each arose and what the broader implications for the respective worlds of existence are. In India, the population density is ten times higher than in Africa south of the Sahara. In India, especially for agriculture, there has been a pressing shortage of land since time immemorial. In Africa, on the other hand, there is more than enough living space for everyone, but not enough hands to utilise it intensively. One wants to reduce surplus mouths, the other is always looking for additional hands and producers of more hands – and the law of supply and demand explains the difference.

At the same time, this elementary truth explains why Hitler could unleash a world war for lebensraum and Japan could dare to challenge the mighty USA to secure its imperialism, while Africans’ aim with war has always been the conquest of women and children. The need for labour for agriculture and mining in sparsely populated South Africa was, of course, also directly causative regarding the (mostly unspoken) motivation for migrant labour and institutional perfection of apartheid.

Fourie tells of and explains these connections, their economic causes and socio-political consequences across continents and ages. He mentions things of which relatively educated citizens are vaguely aware but essentially ignorant, for example, how, when and with what consequences maize came to the country.

The main theme of the book, and the unifying backbone of the diverse chapters with their eclectic subjects and interesting nuggets of information, is that prosperity depends on economic freedom. On the one hand, this is a reassuring message for us as individuals and as citizens – after all, it corresponds to our common democratic disposition and aspiration.

However, this is an oversimplification. Economic freedom and political freedom do not necessarily go hand in hand. On the contrary, places like Singapore and, of course, contemporary China, are examples of an autocratic system of government using trade freedom to successfully achieve the prosperity of their societies.

Moreover, for us South Africans, there is a clear knot: a prosperous community does not remain standing on its own. Entropy – the gradual movement from order to chaos – is inevitable and must be actively countered. When it comes to state administration and the preservation of economic order, it requires active and sustained government policy – and this has been lacking over all the centuries and for almost all of Africa. The rest of the world’s peoples, in the Americas, Europe, the Middle and Far East, Australasia, the multitude of Polynesian islands in the Pacific, the lot, are all to a lesser or greater extent better off than a century or two ago. The world is progressing, its people are becoming wealthier daily, and their living conditions are improving.

Economically, Africa is also improving, but comparatively, we lag behind. The author analyses the multifaceted causes in their historical context: the complex pre-colonial environment, the immense impact of European colonial intervention (the scars of which are still evident today), and the short-sighted and introspective post-colonial attempts at political independence and economic progress. Each society has, of course, walked its own path, but the reader is alerted to principal commonalities, trends, and consequences from which lessons can be learned.

Perhaps the clearest lesson for us here in South Africa is the importance, almost literally the life-criticality, of education for economic progress. The author remarkably demonstrates how robust education systems and their purposeful application were the keys to the rise of the so-called Asian Tigers. Japan is the most striking example. The country lacks all the usual resources. The Second World War left it economically, politically, and emotionally devastated, the scars of the atomic bombs etched into its national psyche. However, it’s not a plain of despair: The country may be poor in geological aids, but it has one unique resource – a homogeneous, disciplined, and hard-working population with a shared heritage and common destiny. The development of this king’s ore becomes national goal number one: thorough, wide-ranging, intensive, and sustained education, from toddlers to prisoners of war.

Compare this then with the ideologically and union-forced sham attempt that Minister Angie Motshekga presents year after year to a jaded public. Anyone with an eye to see and a mind to understand knows that the best township school falls incomparably short of the average ‘model C’ school. Even with the celebrated matric results, it is clear that ‘black’ schools and ‘white’ schools differ enormously, and there are increasingly honest voices, even within ANC ranks, who admit that black students were better off under the loathed Bantu education system. Third-rate schools condemn generations of black children to the same hopeless servitude as their ancestors. Moreover, it condemns our country to perpetual stumbling with ever-increasing numbers of unemployed and uneducated millions. The South African Human Rights Commission’s shocking report ‘The Right to Read & Write’ from September 2021 should have put us all on our back feet. It was met with a deafening silence, probably because we actually know how dire things are.

Fourie probably deals daily with a younger generation than the average reader of this review, and his choice of language certainly falls more familiarly on their ears. He does not write for my generation. But having said all this, I must report that some of his neologisms stand out strangely and that the word choice would sometimes be appropriate for American readers, but for us simply wrong, for example, ‘collateral’ for security. Despite the generally excellent translation, the English (rather American) mindset does shine through here and there. This current book and its two English-language predecessors are probably based on or derived from Fourie’s English-language lectures, and the reader can feel this. Although the publisher can perhaps rightly argue that he brings a novel perspective on Africa to world history, it is certainly not an African perspective – perhaps contemporary Stellenbosch.

It is also noticeable in the content that the author has another, much broader audience than our group of language peers. For a South African reader, the statements are sometimes superficial, even simplistically biased and partisan. Goodness knows, I am not an apologist for either the mining bosses or apartheid, but it is surprising to cite the late Chief Albert Luthuli as an authority to summarise the discussion of the mining industry's controversial migrant labour system. Invoking this venerable grey Nobel Peace Prize laureate as an authoritative source seems (as indeed the title of the English edition of this book, Our Long Walk to Economic Freedom) too much like political point-scoring.

While from a political perspective, I do not wholly support all of Fourie’s conclusions, I agree with Waldimar Pelser that Skatryk is an interesting and indeed important book. The specific economic perspective and the author’s insights indeed provide a unique view of our world, although in a book like this, historically founded but future-oriented and intended for a broad reading public, one might have wanted to see quite a bit about the probable impact of artificial intelligence on human activities. But granted, economists are certainly not fortune tellers – no one can accurately predict the future!

This review was published in Rapport on 30 April. ChatGPT4.0 was used to translate the text into English from the original Afrikaans. Midjourney created the image. I thank Netwerk24 for allowing me to share this review on Our Long Walk.