Nigeria, July 27 -- Why does economic growth and development on the African continent continue to underperform growth and development across the globe? Ignore the twin presumptions that it is important for Africa to grow and develop at all and that the continent's ruling elite are alive to this task, and the answers you get will depend. On how far your history reaches. In which case, both slavery and colonialism took considerable tolls on the continent's resources, either by shipping manpower out, or by organising colonial economies to extract and export resources. And this set the continent back a lot. Or, on your ideological take. In this reading, capitalist solutions continued to subordinate post-independent states to the needs of thei...