A counterfactual imaginary — where would Africa be today if Japan had conquered it in World War 2?

Out East, they have the Asian Tigers yet we Africans boast no massive technology exporter. So why are there no African equivalents? A difficult question this.

At the outset, two observations. We are not Asian, and there are no tigers in Africa. The answer to the question is a toughie that has exercised the minds of economists for three-quarters of a century. My answer to the question is simple. Africans were not conquered by Japan.

At its peak in mid-1942, Japan’s “Greater East-Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” extended southwards from Manchuria to the then Ceylon, and eastward to Papua New Guinea. Within the Sphere, Japan force-marched industrial development to Formosa, coastal China, Korea and Indo-China. The Battle of Midway marked high water when the tide turned against the Empire. But before that one might take note of the list of today’s Tigers in the making.

In late October 1942, Rommel’s Afrika Korps was halted at the second Battle of El Alamein. A month later, the Red Army pushed westward from above and below Stalingrad and closed the net around Von Paulus’ 6th Army. The grand scheme that the Third Reich would gain control of the Mediterranean and then capture Egypt and the Caucasus oil fields with the Imperial Japanese Navy sailing up the Red Sea did not come to pass.

Or did it? 

A counterfactual might read like this. Japan prevailed at Midway, with the US Navy suffering a crushing defeat that led to the sacking of Roosevelt and his replacement by Joseph Kennedy. Isolation followed. After Spain seized Gibraltar, the reduction of Malta followed. His supply lines secured, Rommel drove Montgomery into a disastrous evacuation from Alexandria and then pushed through the Levant. A month later he shared dinner in Baku with the victor of Stalingrad, Von Paulus.

Yet London and Moscow stood firm even as Admiral Yamamoto headed south through the Indian Ocean. Vichy Madagascar surrendered. The British abandoned Mombasa and Dar es Salaam and fled for the safety of Durban, Union of South Africa — the war factory of Great Britain.

The one gain for Britain was the seizure of Lisbon which opened the way for the Union of South Africa to grab both Portuguese West Africa and Portuguese East Africa. 

The US abandoned the costly Manhattan Project while the German nuclear scientists dithered, even as Churchill, Stalin and Smuts pooled resources to build an atomic bomb. Japan made it clear that she had no ambition to traverse the Mozambique Channel as her expeditionary force rushed to Shinkolobwe to seize the yellowcake needed for an atomic device.

The joint British and Soviet prototype was tested at Vastrap in the Kalahari Desert, and a month later a larger plutonium bomb code-named Matryoshka destroyed Berchtesgaden and the Nazi leadership.

Japan, lagging behind, was forced to dismantle its prototype bomb. The threat of mutually assured destruction among the victors then maintained an uneasy equilibrium to the mid-1960s, at which stage the former belligerents and neo-emperors were both harried and exhausted and went home to their earlier borders.

Japan, unlike the other colonisers, left behind newly-industrialising East African and East Asian states who had gained military, administrative and industrial know-how and skills.

So to the sub-equatorial mega-states of 2030, nuclear-powered Capricornia (SADC bar the DRC, Tanzania and the island states) and Watu (Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda).

They have large populations, abundant natural resources, long coastlines, huge agricultural outputs, yet one is at lower-middle income level, while the other enjoys high-income status. Which is which, and what explains the difference?