‘Underdevelopment can be conquered in twenty years’, declared René Dumont in 1962 in a bluntly entitled book, L'Afrique noire est mal partie (Dumont 1966: 223). This didn't happen. By the mid-1980s, most Africans were as poor or poorer than they had been in 1962. Dumont's stirring, if naive, programme for a coordinated, North–South assault on African poverty never materialized.

Many promising African experiments faltered for reasons Dumont identified thirty years ago. The ‘natural conditions’ of Tropical Africa–soils, topography, climate–are indeed more severe than those in Europe and North America. The workings of the global market economy do not favour Africa's dependent, commodity-export economies. But, above all, ‘[m]en are responsible for the economic backwardness of Africa’–both Europeans who exploited the continent for many decades and Africans, especially those in government (Dumont 1966: 31). Dumont, in his forthright and iconoclastic fashion, was one of the first to condemn African governing elites for their selfishness, dishonesty, indifference to the needs of the wealth-creating peasantry, and adoption of colonial attitudes. They seemed intent, he concluded, in creating a ‘modern version of Louis XV's court’ (Dumont 1966: 65).

Dumont's political analysis, though impressionistic, was never-theless prescient in recognizing an impending ‘crisis of governance’. Without an elite committed to development, without incentives for productive rather than parasitical behaviour, and without a lean and efficient state bureaucracy, economic development, Dumont realized, would stall.