Africa as a Success Story: Rethinking Political Organization Before Colonial Rule

What if Africa’s political past has been misunderstood—not as a story of absence or failure, but of deliberate institutional choice? A new working paper, “Africa as a Success Story: Political Organization in Pre-Colonial Africa,” by James A. Robinson, University Professor and Harris School of Public Policy faculty member, and coauthor Soeren J. Henn, offers a sweeping reinterpretation of African political institutions before European colonization.

“Drawing on economics, history, and anthropology, we argue that African societies intentionally organized themselves to prevent political centralization—and that, by their own objectives, they largely succeeded in this political goal,” said Robinson.

The paper establishes a striking new finding: that in 1880, on the eve of the European “scramble for Africa,” the continent was home to an estimated 45,000 independent political units, or polities. Fewer than 2 percent of these could reasonably be classified as states, and less than 1 percent were organized along ethnic lines. Even when larger states did exist, these larger states taken together encompassed at most 44 percent of Africa’s population.

This dramatic level of political decentralization set Africa apart from Eurasia, where large, bureaucratic states became common. Henn and Robinson argue that African societies deliberately chose to keep political authority local, fragmented, and closely tied to community institutions.

Much of the existing literature in economics explains state formation through material incentives, including issues of war, taxation, trade, or the control of resources. While these help explain Eurasian trajectories, the authors argue they do not neatly apply to the context of Africa.

Instead, the paper shows that many African societies actively resisted political centralization. Drawing on historical and anthropological evidence, the authors emphasize the centrality of the local community—often organized through kinship structures—as the fundamental unit of African social life. Centralized state authority was widely viewed as a threat to these local institutions.

 Decentralization was not a passive outcome of low population density or limited resources. Instead, it was purposeful, an equilibrium maintained through social norms, institutional design, and deliberate political choice. Even where states emerged, they were often what the literature calls “segmentary,” blending centralized authority with enduring kinship-based governance.

Seen on its own terms, the authors argue, Africa’s pre-colonial political organization represents a form of success. Societies achieved what they set out to do: preserving local autonomy and preventing the concentration of political power.

Yet this success carried unintended and historically consequential costs. Extreme decentralization made coordinated responses to external shocks difficult. It facilitated competition among polities during the Atlantic slave trade, increased vulnerability to European conquest through divide-and-rule strategies, and complicated post-colonial state-building after independence.

The authors also argue that markets, accumulation, and large-scale competition were often secondary to the political goal of maintaining community autonomy. While the economic costs of this choice were relatively small in a pre-industrial world, they became far more consequential in the face of European mercantile capitalism and colonial rule—setting in motion political and economic realities that continue to shape Africa today.

By reframing Africa not as “failed,” when looked at through a Western prism, but as a case of deliberate institutional choice, the paper contributes to a growing body of scholarship emphasizing the multiple paths to political and social organization.

“Africa’s past is not defined by what it lacked, but by what it intentionally built and defended,” Robinson said.

Robinson is the 2024 Nobel laureate in economics and the coauthor, with Daron Acemoglu, of Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, and The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty. The paper was released as a working paper from the Becker Friedman Institute at the University of Chicago.