Page 120 - Afrika Must Unite

RECONSTRUCTION AND DEVELOPMENT 105
law. He often ended life a richer and more powerful man than his
elder brother left in the old home.1

Another incentive was Puritanism which encouraged frugality
and frowned upon wastefulness and ostentatious expenditure.
As far as the national economy in an under-developed country is
concerned, savings converted into ornaments and squandered
in celebrating religious festivals, in extravagant wedding and
funeral expenses, are as much lost as though they were thrown
into the sea. Tribal society, counting little but sunrise, sunset and
the moon’s apogee, welcomed these festive breaks in the
monotony of passing days, and has carried over the customs into
the present, where another, more stirring philosophy needs to
induce industriousness and thrift.
The legend of the medieval church that ‘to labour is to pray’
encouraged tillage of the soil. It was improved upon by the
exhortations of Protestantism to work hard and be thrifty,
which raised to a cardinal virtue the saving of money and its
investment in profitable enterprise. O ur less energetic society
must be goaded into the acceptance of the stimuli necessary to
rapid economic development by alterations in our social
relationships and habits, if necessary by law. Japan, for instance,
since the end of the Second W orld W ar, has legislated for a cur­
tailed family unit which comprises husband and wife and their
children. Legally, the husband has no responsibility for any
other members of the family outside this close unit. Moreover,
children are being taught not to look to their parents to will
them an inheritance but to fend for themselves. The initiative,
energy and drive thus released are being turned to the expansion
of Jap an ’s national economy.
A sense of devotion and sacrifice helps to instil acceptance of
narrower standards for the present in the interest of wider ones
in the future. A certain amount of belt-tightening is essential.
The Welfare State is the climax of a highly developed in­
dustrialism. To assure its benefits in a less developed country
is to promise merely a division of poverty. Undoubtedly
there must be an investment of a proportion of the capital
reserves in the establishment of minimum wage levels to assure
1 G. M. Trevelyan: English Social History (Longmans 1946), p. 125.