“The failure of Westerners to understand the nature of customary property rights and their embeddedness in kinship groups lies in some measure at the root of many of Africa’s current dysfunctions,” he wrote. “Europeans deliberately empowered a class of rapacious African Big Men, who could tyrannize their fellow tribesmen in a totally non-traditional way as a consequence of the Europeans’ desire to create a system of modern property rights. They thus contributed to the growth of neopatrimonial government after independence.”
