Africans already have an advantage when it comes to happiness – Chude Jideonwo

Over the past year, I have spent much of my time poring through the mountains of evidence and data about what truly makes people happy and flourish, and asking questions of many of its experts — especially economists and psychologists. It is a truly fascinating, and tightly connected, collection of findings.

At the center of all of it is an idea truly elegant in its simplicity: relationships are the most important predictor of happiness, both relationship with self, and — crucially — relationships with others.

Take, for one example, the fascinating object relationships theory, the process by which a psyche is developed in a child. The theory suggests that the way people relate to others in their adult life depends on their family relationships. So for instance, an adult who was abused as a child would expect that behavior in the present. Those images from childhood having turned into ‘objects’ in the unconscious that the ‘self’ now uses to predict social behavior, and also to affect their own reflexes.

Then there is the mind-blowing field of evolutionary psychology (closely intertwined as it often as, in its conclusions, with other areas of evolutionary studies). This is a vast area of human endeavor, so to give you an idea of its operating ideas about human relations, hear Dario Maestripieri, who is an evolutionary biologist from the University of Chicago.

“The most amazing psychological adaptation for pair-bonding — romantic love — creates in the human mind a longing for the desired partner and a psychological dependence not dissimilar from that existing between a young child and her mother,” he writes.

“Successful bonds involve a profound psychological and physiological interdependence between partners such that the absence or loss of one partner can be literally life-threatening for the other. Conversely, solid and stable romantic relationships can have many positive effects on the health and longevity of both partners and their children. In short, whether you like it or not: love is good for you.”

There is the unique African concept of ‘Ubuntu’ popularized by the archbishop, Desmond Tutu: I am a human being through other human beings.

One of the most spot-on definitions of this comes from the authors Lewis Griggs, Lente-Louise Louw‬, in their book ‘Valuing Diversity: New Tools for a new Reality’: “There is sincere warmth with which people treat both strangers and members of the community. This overt display of warmth is not merely aesthetic but enables formation of spontaneous communities. The resultant collaborative work within these spontaneous communities transcends the aesthetic and gives functional significance to the value of warmth. How else are you to ask for sugar from your neighbour? Warmth is not the sine qua non of community formation but guards against instrumentalist relationships.”‬‬‬‬

Indeed when visitors from the West come to Africa, one thing that always shines from their assessments is the word ‘warmth’, not just literally the sun, but the warmth of its peoples.

This centrality of relationships, so easily embedded in much of the African consciousness, is what the West has now turned to with urgency as it deals with an overwhelming epidemic of loneliness, depression, anxiety and suicide despite rising incomes, and better technologies.

Africa has a very big advantage when it comes to happiness. So how come we remain at the bottom of the World Happiness Rankings every year?

Well, people will point to the fact that we are also the poorest continent in the world. And that’s an easy conclusion, but one that, based on all that happiness thinkers have discovered, confuses correlation with causation.

Strong personal income is clearly a useful baseline for building personal happiness. But economists have since discovered that after a certain limit, it stops mattering, as well as the fact that income only seems to make people happier if their incomes are higher than others, as underlined by the concept of social comparison.

It makes it clear something everyone from Socrates to Jesus already knew before the data came in: money and its pleasures might bring you the illusion of happiness, but happiness, like all emotions is something you can have or lose, whether you have material possessions or not. Money is correlated to personal happiness to the extent that people think it is important.

You take away the perception, and they realize that eudemonia (happiness/human flourishing) is already available, according to Aristotle in Nicomachean Ethics, where people are “virtuous, being loved and having good friends”. Or as wise South African elders told us centuries ago — “Ubuntu.”

Africa continues to follow the world in a race to the bottom for more economic growth, consistent with a capitalist ethic that assumes — despite all the evidence from behaviourial research — that the more private wealth the world has, the more wealth nations secure for citizens.

But as we see from Botswana in the last World Happiness Report, we are getting the short end of this stick. Many of our nations remain poor, even when we discover natural wealth, and then nations like Botswana boast strong GDP per capita, but still score incredibly low on social trust, and thus stay at the bottom of the happiness rankings.

This article first appeared on MEDIUM