How To Solve African Poverty — The Heart of A Cheetah Book Review
Magatte Wade’s new book, The Heart of a Cheetah, is an incredible look at the life of one woman who is changing the way we’ve traditionally viewed African poverty and poverty around the world. Yet it’s also the story of one individual defeating giants, one Goliath at a time.
Wade’s book opens with a scene of the staff at her factory in Senegal Africa sitting at a table discussing what needs to happen to bring their products to world-class standards and why this matters.
As Wade explains, the typical solutions and explanations for African poverty do not fit with the facts. Many people believe that African poverty is due to a lack of education, yet there are many people in Africa with master’s degrees who can only find jobs selling cheap items on the streets.
Others claim that African poverty is due to the European Imperialism of the past. Wade explains that European Imperialism does have lasting negative impacts — but not in the way that most people believe.
Basically, everything that everyone “knows” about poverty, prosperity, and the plight of the “third world” is almost entirely wrong. And if we genuinely care about people who are poor, our entire way of thinking about these issues is going to have to change.
Magatte Wade is famous for saying that she is not interested in merely reducing poverty in Africa, her goal is to create prosperity. She envisions a future where Africa is wealthy and Africans are proud of their culture, creating new things, and exporting high-class exotic products to the whole world. She imagines a future where products are seen as high class because of their quality, and because they come from Africa.
As Wade points out, in recent decades, several countries in East Asia have gone from being extremely poor to becoming some of the wealthiest places on Earth.
This book resonated with me as someone who grew up in the Church. The typical approach to poverty from the West has been to send rice and beans overseas and to build schools in poor villages. But what if there were more?
Charity is not a bad thing in and of itself, but as anyone who has studied poverty and economics knows, international charity is a band-aid on the broken leg of a cancer patient. (My words, not Wade’s.) In many cases, international charity has even harmed poor people.
The Heart of A Cheetah points to the fact that the only thing that has successfully raised entire nations out of poverty is Free-Market Capitalism.
When people are free to buy and sell without government interference, and when the laws and courts protect the rights of the individual, while upholding legal contracts, it provides the fertile and necessary ground for an economy to grow and thrive.
But Wade is no mere activist promoting arm-chair philosophy, she is herself a successful entrepreneur bringing world-class African-made products to some of the wealthiest markets in the United States. This has included bisop, a traditional African hibiscus drink, premium lip balm, and skincare products.
A Deal With God
The most compelling part of Wade’s story was an event where she was driving on the most beautiful road in the world, Highway 1, and nearly drove off the edge of a cliff.
I cannot ruin the details here. The story is too compelling. But this resulted in Wade making a deal with God to devote her life to helping those who are trapped in poverty.
Wade explains this story in detail in her interview with Dr. Jordan Peterson.
Bissap and Africa’s Place At The Table
Magatte Wade tells a compelling story of when she and her late husband traveled to her home country of Senegal. Traditionally, Senegalese people would share a hibiscus drink known as “bissap” with their guests. This drink had deep cultural significance and represented a gesture of value towards the other person. Its meaning went beyond just a tasty drink.
Yet when she returned to the country of her childhood, the people offered her Coke, Fanta, and Pepsi, western soda pop brands, things that could be found in any grocery store in America.
When she asked her hosts about where the bissap was, she was confronted by the reality that her people looked down on their own culture, and their own traditional drink, and were instead embracing these Western drinks as the cool thing to drink.
Shocked by this, Wade lay awake and eventually decided to reverse colonize her own culture, and determined to export this traditional drink to the West.
Despair soon turned to productivity, and with the guidance of her husband, Wade started a company selling African bissap to wealthy Whole Foods customers in the U.S. Because of Wade’s leadership, this traditional drink took it’s rightful place as African Chic, and was exported to the wider world.
Wade has gone on to start other companies that hire both women and men in rural Africa, creating opportunities that people in these communities never thought possible.
By using this “for profit” method, Wade’s wealth creation has the potential to grow exponentially. Bags of beans and rice brought on missions trips can only help a finite number of people for a finite amount of time, but tractors and factories have the potential to grow entire economic “orchards” that can spread wealth all around the world.
The Heart of A Cheetah is the story of one woman who is moving mountains.
Points of Disagreement
I want to make it clear that I highly endorse this book. I’ve bought several copies and have given them out. That said, there are areas where Wade gets it wrong.
The most important thing that Wade gets wrong is when she repeats the narrative that there is an epidemic of police officers going around shooting black people for being black. This is something that we keep hearing in culture and in the media.
But no matter how many times activists and the media repeat something, echoing such a claim does not make it true.
The reality is that police shootings of any kind are very rare, and in most cases the shooting was a justified last resort where the officer had to protect their own life, or the lives of people in the community.
That’s not to say that every shooting is justified. The case of Philando Castile seems to be a case where a police officer panicked and unjustifiably shot a legal firearm owner.
On the other hand, in the case of Michael Brown, the suspect was physically attacking a police officer, and the officer shot in self-defense. These facts were established by black eyewitnesses and by an investigation conducted by the Obama administration. In other words “Hands up! Don’t shoot!” never happened. It was a lie made up to stir up violence between police and black Americans.
I propose that if such lies weren’t spread by the media, Castile would still be alive today.
Former Harvard Professor of Economics, Dr. Roland Fryer, explains in more detail:
I also do not agree with Wade’s characterization of Dr. Thomas Sowell’s work as telling people to pull themselves up by the “bootstraps.” Dr. Sowell himself has rejected this “bootstraps” argument many times and pointed out that his job as an economist is to examine various economic factors and determine their effects.
Wade, however, rightly points out that her role is to take the lessons of men like Sowell, bring them to the masses, and implement them in business. And this she does well!
While I may take issue with several points in The Heart of a Cheetah, I cannot emphasize enough that this woman is a hero, and that she is creating something that has the potential to raise billions of people out of poverty.
Why This Book is a Must-Read
Westerners often believe that charity is the way to bring nations out of poverty, yet Wade’s book points out that charity has never raised any people out of poverty. Quite the opposite, many forms of charity are harmful to the poor.
Wade explains that the only way Africa will rise out of poverty is with industry, free markets, and international trade. For Africans to become wealthy, they are going to have to produce wealth that they can export and trade with the rest of the world.
While this book explains many aspects of economics, prosperity, poverty, and culture, The Heart of A Cheetah is no textbook.
I often pray for the day when I walk the streets of Kenya and see wealth even greater than what I saw when I lived in Miami.
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