Going Behind the Mirror Image

This chapter begins by describing the mirror image between Africa and Europe and what it looked like on the dawn of colonial occupation, as described by Western anthropologists. In Europe, we find freedom, monogamy, the rule of law, patrilineal descent, and WEIRD people (Western, educated, industrialized, reading, and developed). In Africa, we find the opposite: slavery, polygyny, customary law, matrilineal descent, and not WEIRD. The proposed explanation for the difference, and the one that also explains the mirror image quality of the comparison, is freedom as a widespread social norm in Western Europe and slavery as a widespread social norm in Africa. The chapter then presents the conceptual framework behind the historical explanation. It highlights the difference between norms and institutions; discusses slavery and freedom as social norms; defines the institutions that preserve slave wealth; highlights the distinctions between “freedom” and “liberty”; and describes the inefficiencies of slavery and how its abolition unleashes freedom dividends.