Out of Africa

Late in the hunger season (the months before the harvest) of 2011, the family of Leonida Wanyama was on the edge. Food had almost run out. Leonida, her husband, and the five kids at home got by some days on nothing but tea. The cause of the family’s struggle, though, was not so much destitution as ambition. As Roger Thurow tells it in The Last Hunger Season: A Year in an African Farm Community on the Brink of Change, Leonida had sold all of her maize crop from the previous year—achieved with hybrid seeds and fertilizer she bought on credit from an American nonprofit, One Acre Fund—to pay the tuition for her teenage son Gideon at one of the better boarding schools in her part of western Kenya. This juxtaposition of middle-class aspirations—and mobile phones (Leonida’s has Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Flight of the Bumblebee” as the ringtone)—with near starvation is one of the many revelations of The Last Hunger Season . Another is the rapidity with which the four families Thurow profiles move from desperate survival tactics to bold entrepreneurial plans during the hunger season as soon as the bountiful maize harvest is in. It’s not news that agricultural surplus begets economic development; it’s just pretty amazing—and surprisingly gripping—to watch this dynamic play out at the household level. This is something new for Africa. After years of filling bookshelves with big-picture polemics about what’s wrong with the continent—and what’s wrong with Western attempts to fix it—publishers are beginning to offer positive economic tales (as are filmmakers; there’s a documentary version of The Last Hunger Season in the works). Some of the recently released books, like Thurow’s, aim to stir readers mainly on a humanitarian level, but others may interest those looking to cash in. After decades mostly off of the global economic grid, Africa is opening up for business—and an African business literature is starting to emerge. Part of the story is that Western do-gooders are finally responding to criticism that past charity on the continent merely fostered dependency. In The Last Hunger Season, One Acre Fund founder Andrew Youn, an American MBA, is out to bring the teachings (and seeds and fertilizers) of the Green Revolution to the small farms of Africa and hopes to break even on his seed and fertilizer sales and loans to farmers. Across the continent, in Ghana, Whit Alexander is actually out to make a profit with his rechargeable-battery rental service, though he’s still pretty far from doing so by the end of Bright Lights, No City: An African Adventure on Bad Roads with a Brother and a Very Weird Business Plan, a hugely entertaining and insightful account by his older brother Max. A cofounder of the board-game company Cranium, which sold out to Hasbro, Whit was looking for an entrepreneurial venture that would (1) do some good and (2) return him to West Africa, where he spent his postcollege years in a succession of jobs that according to Max fit the profile of a CIA agent. Max, a former editor at the Hollywood trade publication Variety, thought it might make for a good bonding experience—and a good book—to follow his brother into the Ghanaian hinterlands. “It would be hard to overestimate the obsession with batteries in African villages with no electricity.” Max Alexander, Bright Lights, No City: An African Adventure on Bad Roads with a Brother and a Very Weird Business Plan Whit’s business plan, as Max notes, is straight out of the late C.K. Prahalad’s The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, which told of the opportunities available in meeting the needs and desires of the poorest two-thirds of the world’s population. The customers he targets live off the electrical grid; they buy low-quality disposable batteries for their radios and flashlights when they can afford them. His company, Burro, aims to rent rechargeable AA batteries that deliver more power at a lower cost (and with lower environmental impact). This rent-and-recharge model is complicated and labor-intensive, and profits remain elusive. It’s only near the end of the book, when Burro brings to market a phone charger and a lamp designed to work with its batteries, that the business seems like it might have a shot at taking off. (“No more talking,” one villager interrupts as a Burro employee reels off the virtues of the new phone charger. “We want to pay.”) As a business story it’s really not much, at least not until the very end. But as a snapshot of a backward but booming West African country, the book is (or at least seems; I’ve never been to Ghana, so I can’t verify) pretty brilliant. The same can’t be said for Rwanda, Inc.: How a Devastated Nation Became an Economic Model for the Developing World. The book is a landmark of sorts—it may mark the first time a country in the heart of Africa has been held up as an economic-development paragon along the lines of Singapore. But authors Patricia Crisafulli, a journalist, and Andrea Redmond, a talent-management consultant, aren’t up to the task of explaining Rwanda’s amazing transformation or how other countries might emulate it. As best I can tell, their advice would be “hire Paul Kagame as president,” which isn’t helpful. And although they state repeatedly that they’re not out to deify the Rwandan leader, the tone of the book is painfully, stultifyingly admiring. South African social media entrepreneur Alan Knott-Craig comes across as painfully self-admiring once or twice in Mobinomics: Mxit and Africa’s Mobile Revolution (coauthored with journalist Gus Silber). But that’s OK, because he saves most of his words for Mxit, a burgeoning social network for mobile phones that he bought last year. We’re not talking iPhones; Mxit is optimized for the relatively bare-bones devices like the Samsung E250 (“the AK-47 of phones,” Knott-Craig calls it) that ordinary South Africans can afford. Mxit, like M-Pesa, the Kenyan mobile phone–based payment system, is the sort of high-tech bottom-of-the-pyramid phenomenon that leads to thoughts that, in the mobile era, Africa might be an innovation hotbed. Sure, Mxit has only about 50 million users to Facebook’s nearly 900 million. But “Facebook is substantially more complicated,” says a South African technologist quoted by Knott-Craig. “Mxit is simple, and it works beautifully, and it addresses the needs of 90% of humanity.” Mobinomics was written for a South African audience but is available outside the country on Kindle. In places it’s a little tough for outsiders to follow. But the sheer novelty of reading a tech-entrepreneurship saga set in Stellenbosch, a Western Cape province college town known mainly for its wineries, is invigorating. And that, despite big differences in quality and approach, is what unites these four books—and makes them of interest to Western entrepreneurs, managers, and investors. They are business success stories from a continent that, until now, had few to offer. Let’s hope there are many more to follow.

Out of Africa

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