Doing Business in Africa: How Culture Changes How We Work Together
Remarkable Africa
The relative uniformity of approaches taken by the West to Africa is to me amazing. I ask: if there is even one Western business interest or person that attempts to engage in an African language, never mind also indigenous resources? I have not found such. Instead every approach from the West ignores most of the impacts that translation into local contexts/languages/cultures will have on the practices that they advocate. This is comparable to playing a game of soccer while following the rules of cricket (Harries 2011)!
Doing the above, intervening on the basis of local languages and resources, is not a guaranteed formulae to success. It is a means of beginning to bring into view the issues and difficulties that commonly result in outside oriented business interventions leaving behind a trail of dependency. Once the difficulties concerned are in view, then they can begin to be addressed instead of being ignored.
Conclusion
This brief survey of the kinds of contexts faced by Western business people wanting to invest in Africa has articulated and emphasised the need for businesses that intend not to set up dependency to be built on local resources and local languages. It has done this by considering; vagaries of translation, the practice of magic, some very different understandings of the nature of business, and ways in which the introduction of Western models of business can be deceptive. Confining oneself to local languages and resources will result in a Westerner being able to identify the kinds of difficulties faced by local business people. These are in turn likely to be the bottlenecks that are preventing indigenously powered economic advance.
PR
Notes
[1] “In fact, when an individual is absent from a communal ceremony, he or she endangers the cohesion of the group and runs the risk of being suspected of wanting to destroy it” (Shamala 2008:135).
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This paper was first presented as, “Doing Business in Africa – a contextual approach” at the Faith Reliance Symposium, sponsored by the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability, the Acton Institute and TWR (also known as Trans World Radio). The theme for the symposium was “Instilling Healthy Interdependency Together” and was held October 8-10, 2013, at the TWR international offices in Cary, North Carolina. https://www.twr.org/news_and_blogs/2013/05-29/faith-reliance-symposium-2013-explores-businesspeoplersquos-role-in-counteracting-dependency?
Category: In Depth, Summer 2015
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