Africa Is Not a Laboratory, Africans Are Not a Surplus Population
As the child of African migrants to the Global North — my parents having endured the conditions assigned to both skilled laborers and menial workers — and having spent the past five years critiquing the university’s treatment of Africans as guinea pigs in experiments aimed at producing “best practices” for human and social development, I have been reflecting on recent coverage of African migration, particularly in The Economist — from “Emigration from Africa will change the world” to “Africans need jobs. The rest of the world needs workers” — alongside its portrayal of social science research in Africa, especially in “How poor Kenyans became economists’ guinea pigs.” Across these articles, African emigration is framed as both a demographic inevitability and an economic opportunity, while Africa itself is cast as a global epicenter for experiments ostensibly designed to “save” the poor.
Taken together, these narratives expose, without irony, the persistent colonial arrogance that continues to structure today’s so-called “development” discourse. Africa’s youth are positioned not as agents capable of reshaping the world against the grain of neo-colonial regimes of underdevelopment, but as a reserve labor force for aging, low-birthrate economies of the Global North — a “solution” to their demographic decline. Simultaneously, Africans are cast as “economists’ guinea pigs,” raw material for randomized controlled trials (RCTs) conducted by Western universities. In both cases, African lives and futures are framed not as ends in themselves, but as instruments to satisfy external needs: as data to be extracted or labor to be deployed elsewhere.
Yet this mass availability of African bodies for extraction — whether as labor or as research subjects — is no natural process. It is the engineered outcome of deliberate underdevelopment: the systematic sabotage of economic self-sufficiency to make African resources — both natural and human — extractable on colonial terms.
The casual assertion that “Africans need jobs; the rest of the world needs workers,” as The Economist proclaims, is not a neutral observation of demographic trends. It is an ominous proposition: a global reordering in which Africa’s demographic vitality is framed not as a wellspring of African flourishing, but as a strategic reserve for imperial economies scrambling to maintain their standards of living. Africans are cast either as objects of pity (to be studied and “fixed”) or objects of extraction (to be exported as cheap labor). In either case, African autonomy — political, economic, existential — is the absent concern.
This logic becomes starkly visible in the RCT frenzy unfolding across Kenya. Poor communities are selected, divided, administered placebos or minor interventions, and observed like petri dishes under a microscope — only to be left, years later, with lingering suspicions and no structural transformation. The euphemistic language of “randomisation” cannot conceal the asymmetry at work: Africans are studied but not heard; experimented on but not empowered; extracted from but not invested in. These trials are not designed to recognize African autonomy and capacity. Their primary purpose is to generate exportable findings for Western academics, NGOs, and policymakers.
Linda Kinstler’s “How Poor Kenyans Became Economists’ Guinea Pigs” recounts how RCTs have become the dominant method for extracting knowledge from impoverished Kenyans. She notes that the “randomistas” — economists like Michael Kremer, Esther Duflo, and Abhijit Banerjee, Nobel laureates celebrated for popularizing RCTs — have transformed western Kenya into “the global epicenter of experiments.” Yet even as Kinstler gestures toward ethical dilemmas, her narrative remains haunted by the fantasy that extraction, if properly regulated, can still “save” the poor.
Her account lays bare the cruelty: entire villages, like Okela-C in Siaya County, subjected to lotteries where some households received cash transfers and others were left to wonder what life might have been like “had the randomisation algorithm smiled on them.” The testimonies of villagers — clinging to the hope that “luck will fall on you” — expose the profound violence of a system that fractures communities and sows resentment. Yet Kinstler ultimately reaffirms the premise that RCTs “may still be the best tool for solving poverty,” even after documenting how these experiments seeded rumors of cursed money (pesa marach) and subjected participants to humiliations like saliva sampling to measure cortisol levels and validate their self-reported emotional states.
There is a bitter historical echo here: the legacy of colonial ethnography and medical experimentation on colonized bodies, where suffering was justified in the name of producing “universal” knowledge. Today’s randomistas posture as harbingers of scientific rigor and “dignity audits,” but their interventions are structured by the same asymmetries. Ethical codes function less as guarantees of justice than as rationalizations for a paradigm that turns African underdevelopment into an experimental field, cultivating and harvesting its strange fruits as data.
The structural asymmetry I observed during my time at the University of Washington’s Office of Global Affairs reflected this same logic: Asia was treated as a lucrative market for international students; Europe and the Anglosphere as prestigious partners; Latin America remained “underdeveloped” in institutional engagement; and Africa was overwhelmingly framed as a site for extracting research subjects. Though Africa accounted for approximately 40% of UW’s awarded international research grants, African students made up less than 1% of the international student body, African lands hosted only about 4% of study abroad programs, and African researchers comprised just 3% of co-authors on research publications. The “global” university’s division of labor thus mirrored the larger coloniality of global affairs: Africa as a zone of extraction without reciprocity.
Meanwhile, The Economist’s portrayal of African youth as the natural labor reserve for the aging North — a demographic “mega-trend that will define the 21st century” — replays the same colonial logic on another register. Migration is not framed as a right or a practice of self-determination, but as a market adjustment: Africa produces too many young people; Europe and America too few. The neoliberal solution is not to repair the devastation that structurally underdeveloped African economies, but to siphon African vitality into imperial centers — to be taxed, policed, and ultimately discarded.
To embrace this demographic shift uncritically is to silently accept a new architecture of global apartheid: mobility for some, containment for others. Migration is welcomed only when it reproduces hierarchies; surplus populations remain trapped behind militarized borders, policed by Western-funded regimes. This is not “opportunity” — it is displacement masquerading as policy.
Both the RCT regime and the labor-export vision betray a deeper refusal: the refusal to imagine Africa as a site of sovereign becoming rather than dependent utility. Africans are positioned to aspire either to be research subjects or migrant laborers — a grim, externally imposed choice between laboratory rats and wage slaves.
What The Economist celebrates as a “mega-trend” — a supposedly inevitable migration wave triggered by demographic imbalance — is, in fact, the intensification of what I have elsewhere called the Third Scramble for Africa: the reinvention of slavery within global labor markets, and the weaponization of anti-Blackness to discipline, contain, and exploit African bodies. Just as Africa’s mineral and agricultural wealth has long been plundered, so now are African human resources systematically extracted — bodies mobilized for disciplined labor, or immobilized for controlled experiments.
The so-called “development loans” offered to African states bind them into perpetual dependency, systematically underdeveloping their economies and stripping their populations of viable futures. As national economies tremble and collapse under the weight of unpayable debts — mechanisms that mirror the racialized debt structures imposed upon the formerly enslaved — African governments are coerced into exporting not only raw materials but human beings as disposable labor. These migration programs, often touted as “pathways to economic opportunity,” are the human counterpart to the resource curse: displacing populations for the enrichment of imperial economies still profiting from Africa’s enforced underdevelopment.
Increasingly, worker visa programs churned out for African migrants are not designed to offer citizenship or security, but to maintain a precarious, deportable labor force — cheap bodies for hard, degrading work. Their status mirrors that of historical chattel slaves and debt peons: essential for production but excluded from protection or dignity. This is no contradiction within liberal capitalist democracies; it is their logical continuation.
As Kenya’s President William Ruto seeks to “export 1 million Kenyans a year,” migration is framed not as freedom, but as survival for economies yoked to debt and extraction. The Global North welcomes African labor but not African life; it craves Black productivity but fears Black presence.
Even those African migrants who survive the brutal machinery of economic extraction face the burden of anti-Blackness. The Economist’s vision of Africans as “the new model minority” in America reveals the third, brutal dimension of this migration regime: its reliance on discipline and conditional inclusion. African migrants must prove their worth through submission to racialized norms — rewarded only with precarious acceptance. Those who fail or refuse to embody this role are often met not with tolerance but with punishment: racial profiling, employment discrimination, detention, deportation, police violence.
Against these visions, Africans — both those mobilized for labor and those immobilized for experiment — can and must affirm a different horizon: one where African futures are shaped not by the extractive needs of others, but by the greater autonomy of Afro-diasporic communities, the avenging of the Black Ghost of Empire, and the flourishing of a Black Planet.
This demands an end to the treatment of African people as data points and demographic solutions. It demands reparative investment, structural transformation, and the dismantling of the neo-colonial systems that siphon Africa’s wealth, labor, and creativity for imperial centers.
Africa is not a laboratory. Africans are not a surplus population.
