Credit: Anthere, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Lipton Matthews, Busting African Delusions: Intelligence, Institutions, and the Path to Progress, Independently Published, 2026, 236 pages, $16.07 paperback
American Renaissance has long stressed the legitimacy of whites promoting their own interests. Having assimilated this message, some readers may dismiss any talk of black uplift. This is a mistake, for it is certainly in our interest that blacks (and other non-whites) have every possible opportunity to flourish within their own countries. It is primarily the material prosperity of the West that has attracted millions of outsiders and provoked the crisis of our demographic replacement.
The ambitious postwar development programs aimed at turning impoverished backwaters into tropical Scandinavias failed spectacularly. They were based on false assumptions about human nature, in particular the blank-slate idea. Such failures do not prove the impossibility of incremental improvements consistent with a realistic understanding of race. The goal of “development” should not be to remake the world in the image of Northern Europe, but to promote different ways of flourishing adapted to the differing evolved natures of human beings around the world.
Lipton Matthews is a black Jamaican researcher who thoroughly understands racial differences in mental aptitude and other traits relevant to modern economies. Indeed, his new book is dedicated to the memory of Richard Lynn. As the title Busting African Delusions implies, a principal aim is to refute the mistaken ideas that have held the continent back. But he has a positive message as well, seeking to outline the sorts of policies that could allow Africans to achieve their full potential — as constrained by their evolved traits and dispositions. A work like this has long been needed.
The importance of intelligence
Mr. Matthews begins with a long chapter on intelligence, its measurement, and its predictive value for the success of individuals and societies.
Human intelligence is our “evolved toolkit for solving problems, anticipating consequences, and navigating the complexities of the social and material world. Individuals with high intelligence learn faster, reason more effectively, and make better decisions under pressure.” Accordingly, IQ is highly predictive of success in both school and professional life. In the modern workplace, the most intelligent
consistently outperform their peers in roles demanding sustained reasoning, judgment under uncertainty, and the ability to integrate complex streams of information. Whether analyzing technical data, coordinating teams, or innovating new solutions, cognitive ability is the single most reliable determinant of success. Productivity, accuracy, and adaptability are all strongly correlated with intelligence.
IQ even helps to predict health and longevity. And it is highly hereditary, perhaps as much as 80 percent. Other personal qualities such as conscientiousness, diligence, curiosity, and social skills contribute to personal success, but these are partly a matter of heredity as well, and most of them correlate to some degree with intelligence.
Intelligence is just as much a factor in the success of entire societies and nations as in individuals. Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen’s book IQ and the Wealth of Nations (2002) demonstrated that national IQ is the best predictor of economic prosperity, more important even than whether a country promotes free markets.
Professor Richard Lynn
A smart population is associated with low corruption and impartial legal systems that promote predictability and accountability. Smart nations are better able to manage natural and financial resources, because they tend to be future oriented and recognize the costs of short-term exploitation. They maintain higher levels of social trust, meaning that fewer resources need to be invested in finding and punishing cheaters, which greatly reduces transaction costs. Their citizens also show higher levels of civic responsibility and long-term planning. Even democracy is more successful in intelligent societies because smart voters tend to support candidates even smarter than themselves (by an average of 20 IQ points, according to one study).
In countries with lower average intelligence, on the other hand,
moral reasoning often remains particularistic. Loyalty to family or tribe outweighs universal principles, corruption is tolerated as a necessary survival tool, and the future is sacrificed for immediate needs. Governance in such settings struggles to rise above clientelism and short-termism.
This is not a bad description of Africa.
More important than a country’s average IQ is that of its “smart fraction” — the top 5 percent or even the top 1 percent who exert a disproportionate influence on its overall success, economic and otherwise:
Pioneering research by Rindermann, Sailer, and Thompson (2009) demonstrates that the cognitive ability of a nation’s intellectual elite is a stronger predictor of economic prosperity and governance quality than the average IQ across the entire population. Countries with a larger smart fraction — meaning a greater proportion of highly intelligent individuals — tend to outperform others in innovation output, scientific achievements, and institutional effectiveness.
In a region of low average intelligence such as Africa, proper cultivation and promotion of the smart fraction is likely to be especially important.
Education and natural intelligence
Many have stressed access to formal schooling as the key to development and prosperity. Mr. Matthews, however, notes that “it is the cognitive ability of a population, not the number of years spent in school, that determines whether a country achieves sustained prosperity.”
Singapore is consistently ranked as one of the smartest countries in the world, and its educational system frankly acknowledges inequality in native intelligence:
Unlike Western countries that cling to the sentimental myth that all children have equal potential, Singapore accepts a simple truth: intelligence varies, and educational systems must be built around that reality. From an early age, students in Singapore are assessed using rigorous cognitive tests. High-ability students are placed into gifted education programmes that exploit their talents. These programmes provide a higher-order curriculum designed to challenge and extend their reasoning. Students in gifted programmes participate in innovation projects where they are expected to design and build products that solve real-world problems. They are also exposed to research methods in the humanities and social sciences, learning how to investigate, analyze, and present knowledge independently. These programmes cultivate creativity, intellectual independence, and practical problem-solving skills. . . .
Students who do not reach the highest cognitive levels are not abandoned. Their curricula focus on practical skills and applied knowledge, preparing them for real-world success. In Singapore, everyone receives an education, but not everyone receives the same education.
Less talented students are not done any favors when they are subjected to a course of study in which they cannot succeed. The goal of a stratified educational system is to bring out the best of which each student is capable.
Conventional thinking about Third World development has led to construction of school buildings across the African continent. There has been some success in getting young people into the classrooms, and even in keeping them there for years at a time. But none of this necessarily implies acquisition of skills. The author notes that African teachers often have a weak grasp of their subject matter and “overemphasize rote memorization at the expense of higher-order cognitive skills; critical thinking, problem-solving, abstract reasoning, and independent analysis are systematically neglected.”
Obviously, lower average intelligence will prevent African schools from ever matching those of Singapore, but that does not mean Africa could not learn something from Singapore. Mere “access” should be deemphasized in favor of testing to identify the smart fraction of pupils whose careful instruction would pay the highest dividends. These must then be taught rigorously by teachers also recruited from the country’s smart fraction. As Mr. Matthews puts it, “policies designed to identify, nurture, and empower cognitively gifted individuals are paramount.” He adds that for the future, “African development strategies must embrace the potential of genetic screening and editing to improve public health and cognitive outcomes.”
Technology, like education, is often proposed as the key to African development. The author points out, however, that plenty of high-tech is already available to Africans, but remains underused because of “inadequate cognitive readiness.”
This limitation is most evident in the agricultural sector, which employs the majority of the continent’s labor force. Even where technologies such as mobile applications, improved irrigation systems, and high-yield seeds are introduced, the rate of adoption remains strikingly low. This is not simply because the tools are unavailable but because many smallholder farmers lack the literacy and technical knowledge required to use them effectively. A farmer who cannot read a fertilizer label, interpret digital weather forecasts, or operate a simple mechanized plough cannot take full advantage of available innovations. The problem, therefore, is not only material but cognitive. The continent’s development will depend not merely on distributing technologies but on cultivating minds capable of mastering and adapting them.
African vs. European economic life before industrialization and colonialism
Many Africans are attracted to the flattering thesis that Western economic success is due to the exploitation of poorer countries during the colonial era. But the divergence between the economic trajectories of Africa and the West began long before either industrialization or colonialism. Recent economic histories of the West emphasize that the Industrial Revolution was prepared in advance by social developments going back centuries.
One measure of prosperity in pre-industrial societies is the fraction of people employed outside agriculture. In England, this already included 40 percent of the population by 1381. By 1759, on the threshold of industrialization, the figure had risen to 63 percent. The author comments: “The popular argument that European wealth was primarily the result of colonial exploitation collapses when confronted with this evidence. England’s economic lead clearly predates its major imperial expansion.”
The true explanation for this early prosperity lies in
England’s early structural transformation. England urbanized early and shifted labor away from subsistence agriculture into industry and services. . . . Urban centers expanded as occupational specialization intensified. Agricultural innovations such as improved crop rotation and selective livestock breeding generated food surpluses and greater security against famine.
Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries freed large tracts of land for private ownership:
This process gave rise to a new class of commercially oriented gentry who treated land as capital. These farmers invested in productivity enhancing innovations and responded to market incentives. Over time, this led to higher agricultural yields . . . and the expansion of early industrial activities, particularly in textiles.
By the seventeenth century, [England] possessed a sophisticated credit system, functioning banks, enforceable contracts, and an increasingly integrated national market. Capital could be accumulated, invested, and reinvested with relative security. This financial infrastructure encouraged long-term planning and sustained economic growth, producing high living standards generations before mechanised industry appeared.
Ordinary households began reducing their leisure time in favor of producing marketable goods or working for wages in order to finance consumption of new goods such as tea, sugar, or textiles. Economic historians have referred to this shift as the “industrious revolution,” an essential precursor of the Industrial Revolution.
England has been a focus of economic historians due to its central role in the Industrial Revolution and the survival of extensive records there. But Mr. Matthews shows that the economic developments in pre-industrial England were not unique: Sweden, for example, went through many of the same stages of institutional development, although the timing differed. There is even evidence of an “industrious revolution” preceding industrialization in non-Western societies such as the Ottoman Empire and Colonial Latin America. By contrast,
[T]here is no comparable evidence for a consumer or industrious revolution in pre-colonial Africa. This absence is striking precisely because Africa was not cut off from global trade. European and Asian goods entered African markets through trans-Saharan and Atlantic exchange networks, and both elites and ordinary people acquired imported items. Yet this exposure did not translate into sustained, society-wide increases in consumption or into structural changes in household production. Africa lacked dense urban networks capable of sustaining large-scale commercial exchange and diversified consumption. Most societies remained predominantly agrarian, with economic activity oriented toward subsistence rather than market participation. The ingredients that produced consumer revolutions elsewhere were simply not present in sufficient concentration.
In recent years, scholars have made important advances in understanding the economic and social institutions of precolonial Africa, but much work remains to be done. Attempts to estimate African living standards, for example, have relied on the wages paid to Africans by early European trading companies, but these were not representative of the African economy as a whole. As the author explains, labor in Africa
was organized within families or communities, where formal wages were uncommon. Economic rewards came in the form of shared resources, reciprocal obligations, and social support. Attempting to map European-style wages onto these systems produces distorted and misleading conclusions.
Economic growth was not absent from precolonial Africa: indeed, African societies experienced boom and bust cycles just like other parts of the world. Such growth as there was, however, was extensive rather than intensive, meaning that it resulted from increases in population or bringing new land under cultivation rather than rising productivity or technological advance. Such growth did not transform the way of life of the entire societies across the generations, as occurred with the intensive growth characteristic of Europe.
The Kingdom of Dahomey illustrates the potential and limits of pre-colonial African growth. During the height of the transatlantic slave trade, Dahomey achieved per capita export revenues comparable to those of 18th-century Great Britain. Estimates suggest that in the 19th century, Dahomey’s growth rates were not markedly lower than those of Mexico or Brazil. [The slave trade] generated revenue, facilitated the circulation of imported goods, and introduced new technologies.
Yet the profits accrued overwhelmingly to the elites. Dahomey’s total economic output actually declined, since the kingdom was literally selling off its own manpower. In Mr. Matthews’ words, the sale of slaves meant that “wealth flowed upward rather than outward into productive investment.”
Precolonial Africa was home to plenty of industry, including iron smelting, textiles, and pottery.
Nok sculpture, Nigeria. Between circa -500 and circa 500. (Credit: Louvre Museum via Wikimedia Commons)
The history of iron smelting in particular has recently been illuminated by archaeological research. The craft developed no later than 1000 BC, probably independently of outside influence, and did not remain static: “African societies actively developed distinctive smelting techniques” that were incrementally refined through shifts in furnace design and fuel use over the generations, improving both efficiency and output.
Yet iron production remained stubbornly artisanal. Unlike Europe, where cumulative innovation produced mechanization and mass output, African ironworking rarely escaped the confines of small-scale production. This imposed real limits. Iron tools, though often of high quality, were not produced in sufficient quantities to transform agriculture or industry. The scarcity of smiths and the localized transmission of knowledge meant that access to iron tools was uneven and restricted. Consequently, Africa did not experience an agricultural revolution akin to that of medieval Europe, where iron plows, horseshoes, and tools diffused widely and radically increased productivity.
Iron in Africa remained mostly limited to warfare and ritual use, thus failing to revolutionize construction or transport. Furthermore, knowledge was often monopolized by particular families or castes, such as blacksmiths, who tightly guarded their techniques as professional secrets and a source of status. This hindered the geographical spread of technology, never easy in any case across a sparsely populated continent of deserts, dense jungle, and vast savannas. Nor did Africans have access to technological innovations emerging elsewhere.
Precolonial Africa enjoyed extensive trading networks. But the financial arrangements supporting such trade
were overwhelmingly informal, embedded in kinship networks, communal obligations, and personal trust. One of the most frequently cited examples is the ajo system of the Yoruba people. Under ajo, participants contributed regular sums to a central collector, the alajo, who redistributed the pooled funds to members upon request. Comparable systems existed across the continent. These arrangements undoubtedly cultivated saving discipline and offered a rudimentary form of liquidity. However, their limitations were severe. The alajo did not function as a banker in any meaningful sense. He did not lend out deposits, engage in risk assessment, or allocate capital to productive ventures. Instead, the funds remained largely idle, withdrawn by participants for personal use when needed. Modern banking systems expand economic capacity precisely because deposits are not left dormant. They are transformed into loans, investments, and financial instruments that multiply productive activity. The ajo system, by contrast, merely stored value temporarily. It functioned more as a collective piggy bank than as a financial institution capable of driving economic expansion.
Africa had no capital markets, nor any publicly traded companies allowing for pooled capital and the spread of risk. Nor did it have a public credit system:
In the absence of banks or formal lending institutions, credit was extended informally through merchant relationships or kinship ties. While such arrangements reduced transaction costs and relied on trust, they also severely restricted access to finance. Borrowers were constrained by social obligations, and lending remained highly localized, preventing wider economic integration. The lack of structured credit markets also meant that interest rates were inconsistent and loan terms unpredictable. Without formal contracts or enforceable legal frameworks, lenders were understandably reluctant to extend credit beyond close associates. This dramatically limited opportunities for entrepreneurship and business expansion.
Africa had commercial enterprises long before the Western powers arrived, but they were “embedded in social relations, kinship ties, and political authority rather than impersonal institutions.” This allowed robust trade, but made it difficult for any enterprise to expand beyond its home base. Development was also constrained by a lack of objective decision-making due in part to nepotism, and “a failure to develop structures capable of surviving beyond the lifespan of their founders.”
Mr. Matthews explains that precolonial Africa was neither anarchic nor despotic:
Many African societies developed complex political systems that incorporated checks on authority, collective decision-making, and clearly defined property regimes. Pre-colonial Africa contained a wide variety of political arrangements, ranging from highly centralised kingdoms to decentralised chiefdoms. In many cases, power was deliberately fragmented to prevent tyranny. The Oyo Empire in what is now Nigeria is a textbook example of institutional constraint. The Alaafin was not an absolute monarch ruling by whim. His authority was systematically checked by a council of senior nobles whose power extended as far as forcing the king to abdicate or commit ritual suicide if he ruled incompetently or tyrannically.
The Asante Empire similarly combined central authority with participatory governance. The Asantehene ruled within a framework shaped by councils of elders and clan representatives, ensuring that authority reflected a broader consensus rather than personal absolutism. Decision making was collective, legitimacy was conditional, and rulers were embedded within institutional norms that limited arbitrary power. These arrangements fostered social cohesion and political stability, not through liberal individualism, but through collective obligation and shared authority.
African rulers did not practice laissez-faire:
Kings and chiefs were active regulators of commerce, granting trading rights, imposing tolls, and ensuring that exchanges occurred under their supervision. Traders — whether local Africans or foreigners — were required to secure the approval of local rulers before conducting business. Commerce was therefore inseparable from political power and personal patronage.
Africa had a system of property rights, but these
were typically communal rather than individualised. Land was owned by lineages, clans, or communities, with use rights allocated according to status, need, and social role. These arrangements were stable, recognised, and enforceable within customary legal systems. They prioritised group survival and social continuity over individual accumulation. This communal framework ensured access to land and resources for members of the group, reducing the risks of dispossession and extreme inequality. However, it also meant that land could not easily be alienated, mortgaged, or consolidated for large scale private enterprise. The system encouraged subsistence security and social harmony rather than entrepreneurial risk taking.
Social mobility also existed in pre-colonial Africa: “individuals could rise through military success, entrepreneurial activity, or political patronage.” But any wealth which resulted tended to be “socially deployed rather than privately reinvested.” Among the Yoruba, for example,
wealth was inseparable from status and influence, used to attract followers, build alliances, and sustain networks of dependents. Power lay in people. The successful individual was one who could mobilise and maintain a large social following. Capital accumulation in the abstract mattered far less than the capacity to command loyalty and obligation. Wealth was thus a political and social instrument rather than a purely economic one.
In short: “Expectations of redistribution reduced incentives for long-term accumulation,” to say nothing of investment.
Moreover, many African societies were deeply conservative, exhibiting a pronounced aversion to risk and novelty. When successful innovations were achieved, they often got lost quickly due to a lack of “institutions — such as academies, guild systems, or research bodies — that could systematize innovation, standardize methods, and accumulate incremental improvements over time.”
The post What, Realistically, Can Be Done for Africa? Part I appeared first on American Renaissance.
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