Kwame Anthony Appiah: evaluation

Transcript context

…People have looked at this — Singapore and many other examples. Extrapolating out from the place I know best, which is Ghana, one thing that happened in the British colonies was that a middle class was created that was not wholly dependent upon the state, whereas the kind of middle class in the francophone countries of West Africa was, mostly, you got middle-class status by being a civil servant or a lawyer or something, by having some kind of relationship with the state. That goes with the fact that in the British colonies, education, tertiary education starts earlier. So already there was a university college in the Gold Coast before independence, whereas there wasn’t in Senegal, which is the most sophisticated of the West African French states. So, I think that’s part of it. There were people who made money in things like farming and forestry, maybe as mediators in the gold trade — So, the sort of schema story, the cartoon story, is the British do indirect rule, the French do direct rule. The British therefore leave in place the institutions of chieftaincy if they exist or create them if they don’t. The French sort of wipe all that away and create their own structures. Maybe the continuity of political institutions through the colonial period — so that the king of Ashanti is still in place in the middle of the Republic of Ghana — maybe that’s another thing that helps to explain the existence of a stability that’s independent of the formal state because he’s recognized by the state. He’s a member of the House of Chiefs, but his authority and his legitimacy have nothing to do with the Republic of Ghana. It’s older and deeper than that. So, that may be another thing. That doesn’t really apply to Singapore, of course. That is to say, the British didn’t use indirect rule in Singapore, so I don’t know what the story is there. I suspect the story in Singapore is three words: Lee Kuan Yew. And a very good location at the right time.…

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