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Comment by Causality1 | Hacker News Reader

I've heard quite extraordinary stories related to the "grabby kin" problem. Entirely hearsay, but at the same time too common. Most of them keep to a similar theme, that is a combination of entitlement to resources held by your relatives and a lack of emphasis on long-term gains. Probably half of these stories involve someone just getting a small business off the ground and losing it because relatives think they're entitled to anything you own. The food stocks for their vendor cart are eaten by a relative, building supplies are taken to repair a relative's house, seed stock is raided to feed a relative's animals.

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Indeed, this is the theme of Ousmane Sembène’s film Mandabi that recently got a nice release from Criterion: a Senegalese man gets sent some money from a relative working in France, but his family, neighbors, and local officials all demand a slice of it, and ultimately he not only loses the money order, he loses everything.

Barack Obama discussed this culture quite a bit in his first book, Dreams from my Father. He went to Africa as a young man for the first time, and it provides quite an interesting look at what modern Kenyan life was like at the time.

Having lived in southern Africa for 14 years, I can confirm that this is tragically common.

One big problem is that modern capitalism is intensely individualistic, as is Western culture in general. African culture, on the other hand, is completely community-focussed. The individual does not exist apart from the community (family/village), therefore there is no concept of "private property".

This makes for a lot of frustration in intercultural interactions between Westerners and Africans. It's also the reason why almost all successful local development projects target the entire community, not individuals.

(This is not to judge one culture or the other! Just to point out that an economic system developed in one culture cannot be expected to work without problems in a very different culture.)

It's not culture. It's poverty + weak states.

If you don't live in an advanced organized country and you are poor you have to rely on your local group. How else are you going to survive?

If you educate those people, put them in an advanced country and make them well off, you will see individualism appear.

Could also be biological. ie: the Hajnal Line theory.

Aside from being pretty thoroughly disproven, what does the Hajnal line have to do with Africa?

Basically UBI...

No, nearly the opposite. Look up the meaning of the word "universal".

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