Why Franck Zanu is wrong about Africa

“Well, the effort is useless because no black country would ever develop… Black countries meaning the 54 that is on the continent, the 13 black countries in the Caribbean, the Black communities in the United States… you are never ever going to develop.”

Franck Zanu

The quote above encapsulates the central argument of Franck Zanu, a Benin-born American YouTuber. He makes this claim in a video posted to his channel on March 11, 2025, where he is seen speaking to two African students of the University of Bridgeport’s African Students Association. It’s by no means a debate or even a discussion as he talks over them, interrupts them, and dismisses their perspectives. This is almost a permanent feature of the exchanges on his channel.

When asked to clarify what he means by ‘development’, he argues that he means “develop” in the context of achieving industrialized/developed nation status across economics, technology, infrastructure, etc. In other words, based on their having majority Black populations, 67 countries of the world are excluded from achieving development across all domains, including advanced infrastructure, technology and income levels. But having rejected the idea of racism (and thus race) as a reality, Zanu is tactful enough to use culture as a causal substitute.

His guests cite poor leadership, lack of structure, inflation, etc. But Zanu counters and points beyond leadership to what he sees as a lack of culture. In another video on The Karen Hunter Show, where he debates his claim as to why Africans are poor at practising maintenance, he reiterates that Africa’s problem is not leadership:

“Travel the 54 countries in Africa and ask each person… Leadership. Leadership… Not a single railway built by the British is in Nigeria today [but theirs still run]. What do you know in that country that has been properly maintained by the people every day and it works perfectly?”

He is sure to clarify that his idea of culture goes beyond surface elements like food, music, dance, etc. Take the problem of maintenance, the problem is rather cultural and African languages reflect that. “There is no African country… that has an equivalent of the word ‘maintenance’… You’re trying to practice something that is not in the concept of the language.”

To be fair, this is an attempt to demolish the old explanations of Africa’s failures: neocolonialism, imperialism, etc. that still dominate the discourse. This is in order considering the return of Nkrumaism across the continent. But not only are his conclusions wrong, but also his analysis. His arguments land better if culture is replaced with civilization.  Culture is the surface expression of civilization, or what Immanuel Kant called Weltanschauung, the fundamental orientation of a people towards the universe, nature, time, possibility and transcendence. Zanu mistakes the absence of Western cultural forms in African societies for the absence of civilizational capacity. In short, he attributes these cultural forms as the cause of development, and since Africa lacks them, it cannot develop.

Western philosophers of history have documented the archetypes that constitute the West as a civilization. For Paul Tillich, the decisive symbol in the Western historical consciousness is the Kingdom of God, which presupposes that history moves toward a point of fulfilment, that the future can be better than the present and that human action can shape that end. Nietzsche wrote of the individual great men who produce new values. Spengler wrote extensively of the Faustian man. Max Weber wrote of the Protestant work ethic and of the self-determining rational individual. Et cetera.

These are peculiar to Western civilization, no doubt. There are no Asian nor even African analogues to them. The question, therefore, is not whether these Western civilizational archetypes exist or whether they shaped Western development. They clearly did. The question is whether they produced it in toto? Are they causally necessary for development? Must a society possess them, or their equivalents, before industrialization becomes possible?

These questions have been answered by the Asian Tigers—Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, and, with a final thud, China. Their answer should permanently retire Zanu’s cultural determinism. These Confucian societies attained development, not despite their lack of the ideals of Western civilization, but because of it. Confucianism, as it existed in the 19th century, was considered by many Western observers an obstacle to development. In The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism, Max Weber argued that Confucian values were fundamentally incompatible with the kind of rational capitalism that, in his view, had produced industrial development in the West. Weber’s confidence was understandable within the intellectual horizons of his time. What he could not anticipate was that the very Confucian values he saw as obstacles — collective identity over individual autonomy, deference to authority over Protestant self-determination, obligation to family over contractual rationalism — would become, under the right conditions, the precise instruments of one of history’s most compressed developmental transformations. He was spectacularly wrong, and the magnitude of his error is instructive.

But even though Confucianism might help explain the development of the Asian Tigers, the question is: did it produce it? In other words, if these 67 nations imbibed Confucianism wholesale, would they automatically develop? Already, the Western civilizational model, which was exported to Africa during the Structural Adjustment Programme of the 1980s as the interaction between free markets and the rational self-determining individual, failed to produce any real change and has thus proven that it or any civilizational imperatives cannot be a direct cause of industrial development.

Developmental processes are, at best, technical and the products of the actions of human beings—politicians, policymakers, entrepreneurs, technocrats, managers, shopkeepers, etc. (In her history of the South Korean developmental state, Asia’s Next Giant, Alice Amsden shows that the shopfloor manager has an important position in the chain of developmental processes.) A better explanation of the Asian Tigers would be found in the geopolitical opportunities that were available to them and the human beings who seized those opportunities. Thanks to the Cold War, they had access to American science and technology, aid and market as well as anti-Communist ideological commitment. But these were opportunities, not determinants. The Tigers did not automatically develop because America needed anticommunist allies in Asia. Many American client states of that era did not develop. What distinguished Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, and Japan was the quality of the human decisions made in response to those opportunities. Their technocratic leadership built institutions capable of converting the geopolitical circumstances into industrial capacity.

So yes, the problem of Africa is leadership. Zanu often brings up littering as a permanent feature of African streets. Take Kigali, for example; it has been remarked for its cleanliness, including by white tourists. The reason is not that ‘culturally Rwandans are clean’, end of argument. Administrators imposed and enforced changes in the behaviour of their citizens around these problems. Those who live with memories of when the city was littered with dumps are able to retell the moment these changes came into effect. Perhaps, in a hundred years, there’ll be another Franck Zanu screaming on the Internet that Rwandans have a culture of cleanliness. Because that is how human beings, often wrongly, categorise causation.

To give another example, the very peak of Western civilisation, the United States, is one of the most extensively legislated societies in human history. American life is governed by a far-reaching regulatory architecture that reaches into the most intimate corners of daily existence. This is even clearer in the European Union, which is essentially a regulatory superstate. Its main instrument of social ordering is binding rules across every domain of human activity. What presents itself as American or European ‘culture’ is not the cause of this regulatory architecture but its effect. Centuries of enforcement have hardened into behaviours and norms that later generations inherit as ‘culture.’ If this enforcement architecture is removed, the ‘culture’ degrades.

The history of the Tigers is the story of capable, intense, visionary and passionate human beings taking transformative actions, not of the execution of cultural mandates. K.T. Li, Taiwan’s Minister of Economic Affairs and later Finance Minister, made a series of deliberate technocratic decisions that transformed Taiwan, a poor agricultural economy, into a technological powerhouse within a generation. Today, Li’s vision has produced TSMC, the world’s most geopolitically important company. Park Chung-hee in South Korea did not wait for Korean culture to magically generate the conditions for industrialization. Guided by the examples of Japan and Germany, he nationalized banks and used them to coordinate credit allocation to the chaebols. He protected infant industries, empowered and disciplined the chaebols. These were not cultural events but acts of deliberate human will applied through capable institutional structures. The culture followed. It always does.

Zanu’s channel has accumulated a significant following across the African continent and its diaspora. This is precisely because he is attempting something necessary, even timely: demolishing the comfortable fictions of anti-imperial ideology that have insulated African governance failures from serious scrutiny. This makes engaging with him seriously worthwhile, even where his conclusions are demonstrably wrong. He has abandoned racial determinism for cultural determinism, and both produce similar outcomes. He has inadvertently become a lightning rod for right-wing channels whose comment sections of their videos reacting to his takes are filled with racist attacks on African people.

Africa is presently torn between two equally disabling views of its fate. Both are competing for the political imagination of their youngest and most energetic generation. The first has mythologised Captain Ibrahim Traore, externalizing the cause of Africa’s failures, and making internal reform difficult to conceptualise. The second, represented by Zanu, has internalised causation so completely that it makes development appear racially, if not culturally foreclosed for the Black man. For the second, their cynicism appears honest and realistic, even high-minded, but it is mostly empty contrarianism merely debunking the mainstream not transcending it. But these two frameworks, despite the appearance of being opposed to each other, produce the same feeling of paralysis and foreclosure—and condescension towards Africa. What Africa needs to be told is that development is a technical process, that it has been achieved by societies far less favourably positioned than many African nations, that it requires capable institutions and deliberate human decisions, and that the horizon, however distant it appears, is not unreachable. The stakes of believing otherwise are too high to indulge either of these two comfortable fictions.

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