From dismissing African development prospects to treating European-built infrastructure as evidence of African incapacity, Franck Zanu’s arguments raise a fundamental question: is he explaining Africa’s challenges, or interpreting them through a framework that has historically been used to portray Africans as incapable of governing their own future?
There is a difference between criticising Africa and approaching African history with such a narrow framework that the continent's achievements, internal diversity and economic realities disappear from the analysis.
Franck Zanu, the Benin-born American YouTuber behind ZANU Project: rethink, has attracted attention for his arguments about African culture, development, maintenance and collective responsibility. His central challenge to conventional African political commentary is that colonialism, imperialism and bad leadership cannot explain everything; he argues that cultural practices and social organisation must also be examined.
That challenge is legitimate. African leaders should not be permitted to use colonial history as a permanent excuse for corruption, poor infrastructure or failed public policy.
But Zanu's reported conclusion that Black countries will never develop goes far beyond demanding accountability. In a video published on 11 March 2025, he reportedly told two African students that efforts to develop Black countries were futile, extending that judgement to Black-majority countries in Africa and the Caribbean and Black communities in the United States. The argument was subsequently examined in a critical article by Joshua I. Mokwuah in African Arguments, published on 18 June 2026.
This is where the intellectual problem begins.
If a commentator claims that dozens of societies cannot develop because of their culture, he must explain why that culture is supposedly incapable of changing, why economic outcomes differ so substantially across those societies, and why other societies once regarded as unsuitable for industrialisation have transformed themselves.
He must also confront a more uncomfortable historical question: why does an argument that treats European achievements as the standard of civilisation and African differences as evidence of deficiency sound so familiar?
That question does not establish that Zanu is personally a white supremacist. His intentions cannot responsibly be inferred from these arguments alone. It does, however, provide a legitimate basis for examining whether some of his claims reproduce assumptions associated with colonial and racial hierarchies.
The problem with using culture to explain everything
Zanu's most consequential analytical move is to shift explanations for African underdevelopment away from leadership and institutions towards culture. In his discussion of maintenance, he reportedly argues that African countries lack a proper cultural understanding of the concept, even suggesting that African languages lack an equivalent word for it.
That argument deserves to be challenged directly.
First, Africa contains thousands of languages and numerous distinct cultural and historical traditions. A claim about what all African languages lack requires extensive linguistic evidence. It cannot be established by pointing to a few languages or by observing that a particular English word has no direct translation.
Second, vocabulary and capability are not the same thing. A society can perform an activity without using the same word another society uses to describe it. Languages develop technical terminology as new industries, institutions and professional practices emerge.
Third, maintenance is not simply a state of mind. It is an organised economic activity involving inspections, budgets, trained personnel, replacement parts, procurement, accountability and long-term planning.
If a railway is abandoned because successive governments fail to allocate money for repairs, the relevant explanation cannot simply be that the population lacks a cultural concept of maintenance. If the country cannot manufacture replacement components, the industrial consequences of that dependence must also be investigated.
The point is not that culture never matters. It is that a cultural explanation must demonstrate how culture produces a particular outcome, rather than treating the outcome itself as proof of a cultural defect.
Mokwuah makes a related criticism in African Arguments: Zanu risks mistaking the absence of Western cultural forms for the absence of African civilisational capacity. The article points to Asian industrialisation as evidence that development does not require every society to reproduce Western historical values.
Why does his argument resemble white-supremacist thinking?
The question should be approached through the structure of the argument, not an unsupported claim about Zanu's personal beliefs.
Historically, white-supremacist and colonial ideologies often portrayed Europeans as rational, disciplined and capable of governing, while depicting Africans as irrational, disorganised and incapable of managing complex societies without European supervision.
These ideas were used to rationalise colonial rule. If Africans were portrayed as incapable of self-government, European domination could be presented as a civilising mission rather than the exercise of foreign power.
UNESCO's General History of Africa documents how racial stereotypes shaped historical writing and how African oral traditions and historical evidence were frequently dismissed because they did not fit European expectations of what a society with a history should look like.
There is an important resemblance between that historical framework and any contemporary argument that treats African societies as inherently deficient in the qualities necessary for civilisation.
The resemblance becomes particularly significant when several propositions appear together:
- African societies are said to lack the cultural foundations for development.
- European-built institutions and infrastructure are presented as evidence of superior capacity.
- The persistence of African difficulties is treated as confirmation that Africans cannot sustain what others have built.
This is a recognisable pattern of reasoning in colonial discourse. It turns differences in historical outcomes into an implied hierarchy of human or civilisational capability.
However, the distinction matters: a resemblance between arguments does not, by itself, establish that the person making them is a white supremacist. A defensible critique identifies the specific claims, explains their historical parallels and evaluates their evidence.
The central criticism is that a framework can reproduce racialised assumptions even when it substitutes the language of culture for the language of race.
That is a serious intellectual problem, whether or not the speaker consciously intends it.
The myth that Europeans discovered Africa
Any account of Africa that treats European arrival as the beginning of meaningful African history is historically indefensible.
Europeans did not discover Africa. Africa was inhabited by human beings long before the existence of Europe as a modern political and cultural entity. African societies developed their own political systems, commercial networks, technologies, religious traditions, architectural styles and intellectual institutions over thousands of years.
The word discovery can have a limited meaning when describing the first documented encounter between particular people or the introduction of information to a particular foreign audience. But it becomes misleading when Europeans are described as having discovered a continent whose inhabitants already knew, inhabited and shaped it.
The distinction is not merely semantic. It concerns who is treated as the subject of history and who is treated as an object to be discovered.
UNESCO's historical research has documented how European scholars often discounted African oral traditions because they did not understand or accept them as historical evidence. Its General History of Africa project was established in 1964 to produce a more comprehensive account that incorporated African sources, scholarship and historical experience.
Consider what existed before European colonial rule.
Great Zimbabwe
The monumental stone architecture of Great Zimbabwe, which flourished particularly between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries, demonstrates the capacity of African societies to organise labour, construct complex built environments and participate in long-distance commercial networks.
Its history cannot be explained as a product of European discovery.
The Mali Empire
The Mali Empire grew into a major political and commercial power from the thirteenth century. Its history is reconstructed through oral traditions, archaeology and medieval chronicles, revealing a complex political world connected to trans-Saharan commerce.
Timbuktu and Sankore
Timbuktu became an important intellectual and spiritual centre, with scholars, schools and manuscript traditions connecting communities across regions. These institutions were part of Africa's own intellectual history, not gifts that appeared when Europeans arrived.
These examples are not an argument that every precolonial African society was prosperous or technologically advanced in every field. African history included conflicts, political fragmentation, slavery, inequality and changing fortunes, just as other regions' histories did.
The point is that Africa had histories of its own. Its societies were not waiting for Europeans to arrive before becoming historical actors.
A credible African development analysis must start from that reality.
European-built infrastructure does not prove European superiority
One of the most revealing examples in the reported debate is Zanu's comparison between railway infrastructure built under British colonial rule and infrastructure maintained in Britain. Mokwuah reports Zanu questioning why railways built by the British in Nigeria no longer operate as they once did, while railways in Britain continue to function.
The comparison sounds persuasive until the historical and economic context is examined.
Railways do not maintain themselves. Their performance depends on funding, engineering expertise, rolling stock, spare parts, institutional responsibility, traffic, management and sustained investment.
Britain's railway system operates within a domestic industrial economy with extensive engineering capabilities, established supply chains and public and private institutions responsible for its upkeep. Nigeria's railway development has experienced different historical trajectories, funding conditions, institutional arrangements and investment cycles.
Comparing the present condition of the two systems without examining those differences cannot establish an inherent difference in the capacity of their populations.
Nor does the fact that a colonial government built infrastructure establish that it built it primarily for the welfare of the colonised population.
Railways could serve several purposes simultaneously, including transporting passengers, moving goods, supporting commercial activity and connecting export-producing regions to ports. The relevant historical questions concern where the lines ran, what they transported, who controlled them, who benefited and how they fitted into the wider economy.
A colonial railway might have been an impressive engineering achievement and still have been designed around extractive economic priorities.
The two facts are not mutually exclusive.
The same distinction applies to the post-independence period. African governments are responsible for what they have done with inherited infrastructure. Where they have neglected it, they deserve criticism. But that criticism should examine their decisions rather than turn the existence of the infrastructure into evidence that Africans are inherently unable to build or maintain it.
Infrastructure is evidence of engineering and institutional achievement. Its present condition is evidence of the systems that have sustained, neglected or transformed it. Neither fact proves racial or cultural superiority.
The historical double standard: Why is European failure treated differently?
One of the weaknesses in cultural explanations of African underdevelopment is the inconsistent standard applied to different societies.
When a European country experiences economic decline in important manufacturing sectors, corruption scandals or deteriorating infrastructure, analysts generally investigate specific historical and institutional causes. They examine government decisions, industrial policy, demographic change, public spending, economic shocks and institutional performance.
When an African country experiences comparable difficulties, some commentators jump more quickly to conclusions about culture, discipline, collective mentality or an inability to govern.
That is not a consistent method of historical analysis.
Britain experienced industrial decline in important manufacturing sectors. European countries have experienced corruption scandals, deteriorating infrastructure and failures of public administration. These problems do not establish that Europeans are culturally incapable of maintaining an industrial economy.
The same standard should apply to African countries.
If a Nigerian railway fails, investigate the Nigerian railway system. If a British infrastructure project fails, investigate the British institutions responsible for it. If a country's social norms affect its economic performance, demonstrate the relationship with evidence.
Do not turn the failures of one society into a diagnosis of its entire population while treating the failures of another as temporary institutional problems.
There is another historical complication. European industrialisation was not the product of cultural values alone. It involved scientific advances, capital accumulation, state policy, expanding markets, fossil-fuel energy, international trade and, in some cases, wealth accumulated through slavery and colonial extraction.
The historical relationship between industrialisation and empire is extensively debated, and its importance varied across countries and industries. Nevertheless, it cannot responsibly be excluded from an explanation of European economic development.
A serious comparison must examine both internal institutions and international relationships. It cannot attribute European success to superior culture while explaining African difficulties through cultural deficiency alone.
What Zanu's argument misses about industrialisation
Industrialisation is not simply a society becoming more disciplined. It is the construction of an interconnected productive economy.
Consider the manufacture of an electric vehicle. It requires battery technology, electronic components, engineering expertise, mineral processing, specialised machinery, reliable electricity, financing, quality control, logistics and a market large enough to support production.
No single cultural virtue can substitute for that ecosystem.
A population can value hard work and still struggle to build an electric-vehicle industry if it lacks affordable electricity, industrial finance, skilled suppliers and the technical infrastructure required for production.
Conversely, a country can develop strong industrial capabilities by investing systematically in education, infrastructure, technology transfer and manufacturing institutions.
This is one reason the development experiences of Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and China matter. Their transformations involved changing institutions, deliberate investment, international economic relationships and the accumulation of productive capabilities.
African countries must make their own policy choices and cannot assume that another country's model will work unchanged. But they can learn from the underlying mechanisms.
For Nigeria, this means asking how the country can turn its natural resources into domestic manufacturing, develop reliable power, strengthen technical education, expand local component production and support competitive engineering firms.
For other African economies, the priorities will vary. Some may focus on agricultural processing, pharmaceuticals, textiles, mineral beneficiation, digital services or specialised manufacturing.
The practical question is how to build the capabilities that allow people to produce increasingly sophisticated goods and services.
That is a far more useful question than asking whether Africans possess the correct cultural character.
Why African audiences should challenge commentators who speak with certainty about Africa
The popularity of provocative online commentary makes this issue especially important.
Zanu's platform explicitly presents itself as a space for challenging conventional views on social, cultural and political issues. That is a legitimate purpose for a public commentator.
But a willingness to challenge conventional thinking does not automatically produce sound analysis.
A commentator may be right to question the tendency to blame every African problem on colonialism and wrong to conclude that culture makes African development impossible. Both propositions can be true simultaneously.
Audiences should therefore ask several questions whenever someone offers a sweeping explanation for Africa's difficulties.
What is the evidence? Is the argument based on systematic research or selected examples?
What is the causal mechanism? How, precisely, does the alleged cultural trait produce the economic outcome?
What evidence would disprove the claim? If every failed project is evidence of deficient culture, can the theory ever be wrong?
Are comparisons historically fair? Are the countries being compared operating under similar economic, institutional and geopolitical conditions?
Does the argument recognise African diversity? Can one explanation account for the different experiences of fifty-four countries with distinct histories and economies?
Does the analysis offer a credible path forward? If the diagnosis implies that development is impossible, what practical policy or institutional change could alter the outcome?
These questions are not an attempt to shield Africa from criticism. They are what serious criticism requires.
Africa does not need permission to become a modern industrial society
Franck Zanu's reported claim that Black countries will never develop deserves scrutiny because it turns a complex, historically contingent process into an apparently permanent judgement about entire populations.
His emphasis on culture raises legitimate questions about social norms and collective responsibility. But those questions become analytically weak when culture is treated as destiny, when European-built infrastructure is used to imply African incapacity, or when a lack of familiar Western cultural forms is mistaken for a lack of civilisational potential.
The historical record offers a more complicated picture. African societies developed political systems, commercial networks, intellectual centres and architectural traditions long before European colonial rule. Their histories were not created by European arrival, and their futures do not depend on reproducing a single European social model.
That does not mean Africa should romanticise its past or excuse its present failures. Corruption, institutional weakness, poor maintenance and misguided economic policies must be confronted wherever they occur.
But accountability should lead to reform, not fatalism.
The most important criticism of Zanu's approach is therefore not that he is too critical of Africa. It is that his reported conclusions risk
Comments
Post a Comment