African imaginations

By Claude Grunitzky

 Africa is a special continent, rich in traditions and taboos. Only someone steeped in those traditions and taboos can hope to understand the challenges and opportunities before African citizens. 

And yet, the West seems incapable of trusting Africans to analyse their own lives. Take, for instance, the American economist Jeffrey Sachs. An advocate for more aid to African nations, Mr Sachs is one of three editors of  The World Happiness Report 2015. 

Happiness and prosperity are often (if not always) correlated. The first paragraph of the first chapter of this year’s report mentions that “happiness is increasingly considered a proper measure of social progress and a goal of public policy.” The 2015 rankings show my home country Togo as being, again this year, dead last, rock bottom in this odd geography of happiness. 

Sachs and his team have derived a set of measures that supposedly extrapolate positive and negative experiences. These measures were educed by analyzing data from the Gallup World Poll. Here, ‘positivity’ is characterized by smiling and laughter, whilst ‘negativity’ is defined by experiences related to stress and depression. 

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