The Beat of the Drum Cannot Be Ignored
On culture, development, and the signal the world keeps missing about Africa
In many African traditions, the drum does not merely accompany the dance. It precedes it. Before the first step is taken, before the crowd gathers, before anyone decides to move, the drum speaks. And those who know, know. The rhythm carries meaning that needs no translation. It is infrastructure. It is instruction. It is identity, encoded in sound.
Last week, 300 of the world’s most influential development thinkers gathered at Harvard Kennedy School for GEM26: Reimagining International Development — the 17th annual Global Empowerment Meeting hosted by the Harvard Center for International Development. Nobel Laureates, policy leaders, scholars, and practitioners from 50 countries convened to dissect the failures of the global development enterprise and chart pathways forward.
It was, by all accounts, a remarkable gathering. And yet, as I read the proceedings and reflections, particularly the sharp and compelling observations of Professor Kingsley Moghalu — my former boss at the CBN, who argued that “development begins in the mind” and called for shifting both accountability and convening power back to developing countries, I kept hearing something that was not being said. Something that beats, persistently, just beneath the surface of every serious conversation about Africa’s development.
The drum is beating. And the room is not dancing.
The Missing Variable
Moghalu is right that foreign aid has largely failed to deliver transformative outcomes in Africa. He is right that the problem is conceptual before it is financial — that defining development as a series of interventions to “alleviate poverty” rather than a process of building wealth and agency has produced predictable results. He is right that development cannot truly be “international,” that the agency must be internal, and that accountability must return to African governments and citizens.
But here is where I want to press further: if development begins in the mind, what shapes the mind? What forms the worldview from which any genuine development vision must grow?
The answer, I would argue, is culture. Not culture as festivals. Not culture as heritage tourism or museum artifacts. Culture as living infrastructure, the accumulated wisdom, spatial logic, relational practice, and generative knowledge that a people carry in their bodies, their communities, and their built environments across generations.
This is the variable that development discourse, even its most progressive iterations, consistently underweights. And in Nigeria, and across much of Africa, it may be the most consequential variable of all.
What Was Already There
Before colonialism restructured the map and the mind, the African continent was not a blank slate waiting for development. The Nok civilization produced terracotta sculpture of extraordinary sophistication more than two thousand years ago, evidence not just of artistic capacity, but of organized social life, knowledge transmission, and cultural continuity. The Benin Kingdom’s bronze casting rivaled anything produced in Renaissance Europe. Hausa trade networks connected the Sahara to the Gulf of Guinea with a commercial logic and social architecture entirely their own. Yoruba urbanism produced dense, organized city-states centuries before European contact. Igbo political culture developed forms of participatory governance that have still not been adequately studied, let alone learned from.
These were not primitive precursors to civilization. They were civilizations with their own operating systems. Systems for organizing labor, resolving conflict, transmitting knowledge, building community, and generating meaning.
The deepest wound of colonialism was not the extraction of resources, devastating as that was. It was the systematic delegitimization of these operating systems. It was the installation, in the minds of colonized peoples, of the belief that their own ways of knowing, organizing, and building were inferior, or worse, irrelevant. Development, in this framing, became synonymous with becoming more like someone else.
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That wound has not healed. It still shapes how Nigeria’s leaders govern, how her institutions are designed, how her cities are built, and how her young people are educated to imagine their futures.
Regeneration, Not Nostalgia
I want to be precise here, because the argument I am making is frequently misread. I am not calling for a romantic return to a pre-colonial past. I am not suggesting that tradition is always right, or that cultural practices are beyond critique. Cultures change. They must. The question is not whether African cultures should evolve, but whether that evolution is driven from within, rooted in genuine cultural logic, or imposed from without, dressed in the language of modernization.
The distinction matters enormously. A tree that grows from its own roots, however slowly, is fundamentally different from a tree transplanted into foreign soil. One is regenerative. The other is, at best, adaptive and often fragile.
What Nigeria needs, what Africa needs, is not preservation of culture in amber, but regeneration of culture as a living system. The recovery of cultural intelligence as a foundation for governance, education, urbanism, and economic life. The deliberate design of institutions, spaces, and curricula that treat indigenous knowledge not as folklore, but as generative infrastructure.
This is not a soft argument. It is a structural one. Culture shapes the incentive systems, trust architectures, and social contracts that determine whether institutions work or don’t. It shapes the depth of civic participation, the legitimacy of leadership, and the resilience of communities under stress. You cannot build durable institutions on cultural foundations you have been taught to distrust.
A Different Conversation
I agree with Moghalu's suggestion at GEM26 that Harvard and similar forums should become “satellite campuses” in the development conversation, not the principal convening centers, and I want to take the argument one step further. It is not just the geography of the conversation that needs to shift. It is the epistemology.
The frameworks, metrics, and models that dominate global development discourse were built largely without African cultural intelligence as a design input. They measure what they were built to measure. They optimize for what their architects valued. When Africa fails to thrive within these frameworks, the conclusion is rarely that the frameworks are wrong. It is that Africa needs to try harder, govern better, or receive more aid.
But what if the drum has been beating a different rhythm all along, one that carries a different logic of prosperity, a different architecture of community, a different relationship between land, people, and time? What if the problem is not that Africa has failed to develop, but that it has been measured by an instrument that was never calibrated to its frequency?
These are not rhetorical questions. They have practical implications for how Nigeria designs its education system, how African cities are planned, how governance institutions are built, and how the Nigerian diaspora, scattered across the world yet still carrying the rhythm in their bones, chooses to invest its knowledge, capital, and energy.
A Word to Nigerian Youth
Incidentally, the current generation of Nigerian youths is already pointing the way as they forge a new era through music, film, fashion, food, and art. Most of those I have had the opportunity to interact with can feel the contradiction, even if they can’t yet name it. To the young Nigerians reading this, whether at home, in the diaspora, or in between, I want to say something directly: you are not behind. You are not the problem. You are, in fact, the most important variable in this equation.
The development your country needs will not arrive from Washington, London, or Beijing. It will not be unlocked by the next aid package or the next governance reform framework designed in a foreign capital. It will come, if it comes, from your generation’s capacity to do something that requires both courage and deep self-knowledge: to take your cultural inheritance seriously as a resource, not a liability.
That means learning your histories, not just the colonial chapter, but the deep chapters. It means asking what your grandparents knew about organizing community, resolving conflict, and building for the long term. It means bringing that knowledge into conversation with the best of what the world has to offer, not as a compromise but as a contribution.
The drum has not stopped. It has been playing, persistently, through every era of disruption and dislocation. The question is whether this generation will finally stop trying to dance to someone else’s beat and start listening to its own.
Verse Shom is Professor of Practice and Program Director for Social Innovation and Social Entrepreneurship at Tulane University’s School of Architecture and Built Environment. His work spans systems thinking, cultural economy, African development, and systems-centered education. He is based in New Orleans, Louisiana.
