Africa Is Not Poor: Resource Extraction, Colonial Economics, and the Wealth That Was Taken

UBUNTU VILLAGE · AFRICAN WISDOM · COMMUNITY AND JUSTICE · COMMUNITY POWER · ECONOMIC JUSTICE

Africa is the wealthiest continent on earth. It holds an estimated 30 percent of the world’s mineral reserves — cobalt, coltan, gold, diamonds, uranium, oil — resources that power the global economy and underpin the digital infrastructure of modern life. The phones we hold, the electric vehicles being hailed as the future, the data centers running the internet: all depend on materials extracted from African soil. The people whose land holds these riches are, by almost every economic measure, among the least compensated for their presence.

The Architecture of Extraction

In 2018, Africa held 40 percent of the world’s gold and up to 90 percent of its chromium and platinum. The continent’s mineral wealth is estimated at over $2 trillion. The majority of this wealth is extracted by mining companies headquartered in the United States, Canada, Australia, China, and Europe. Profits flow outward. Environmental damage stays. Communities adjacent to mining operations frequently lack electricity, clean water, and functional roads — even as the ore beneath their feet powers the global supply chain.

This is not an accident of geography or governance. It is the continuation of a system designed during colonialism and maintained through debt structures, trade agreements, and the legal architecture of multinational corporate law. The Democratic Republic of Congo produces approximately 70 percent of the world’s cobalt — essential to every lithium-ion battery manufactured today. Congolese artisanal miners, including children, work in dangerous conditions for wages that bear no relationship to the value of what they produce. The cobalt goes to processing facilities in China, then to manufacturers in Asia and Europe, then into consumer products sold globally at retail prices that no Congolese community can afford.

What Ubuntu Economics Demands

Ubuntu — I am because we are — is not only a personal philosophy. It is an economic one. It holds that the resources of a community belong to the community, that wealth extracted from shared land must benefit those who live on that land, and that no economic arrangement is legitimate if it requires the poverty of some to produce the prosperity of others.

African economists and political thinkers — from Thomas Sankara to Samir Amin to Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala — have argued consistently that Africa’s economic challenge is not a lack of resources but a lack of sovereignty over its resources. This is not a development problem. It is a power problem. And power problems require political solutions, not charity ones.

The movement for resource sovereignty is active across the continent. In Burkina Faso, the transitional government has renegotiated mining contracts and moved toward nationalization of gold resources. In Zimbabwe, the government has mandated local beneficiation of lithium before export. These are contested, imperfect, politically complicated processes. But they represent something important: the insistence that African wealth should serve African people first.

The Diaspora’s Role

For the African diaspora — including Black communities in the United States — the resource extraction question is not abstract. Our ancestors were themselves extracted: taken from the continent as the original resource, their labor the foundation of wealth we were never permitted to inherit. The connection between the transatlantic slave trade and today’s mineral extraction economy is not metaphorical. Both operate on the same premise: that African bodies and African land exist to generate wealth for someone else.

Ubuntu Village holds this history as context for all of our work. When we support communities in Kenya, Uganda, and Nigeria, we are not delivering aid to the underdeveloped. We are in relationship with communities that are wealthy in knowledge, in land, in tradition, and in collective capacity — communities that have been deliberately impoverished by systems we are all, in different ways, implicated in. That recognition changes the nature of the work. It becomes not charity but solidarity. Not service delivery but shared accountability.

— MM

References: African Development Bank Group (2023). African Economic Outlook. Hickel, J. (2018). The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and Its Solutions. Zuberi, T. & Bonilla-Silva, E. (2008). White Logic, White Methods. Global Witness (2023). Beneath the Surface: The Hidden Costs of Cobalt Mining in the DRC.

The East Came. The West Came. Africa Was Already Here.

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