As far as I am concerned, development is very easy. Africa doesn't have to reinvent the wheel, it just needs to copy. The political system that will emerge from having a strong middle class will ensure that there are property rights. It will ensure a stable democracy that really works and will ensure that we will actually get long-term sustainable growth and participation by the local citizenry.

DJ: Richard, in your book Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles you end on quite an optimistic note - you feel that Africa is at last beginning to find itself. Your perspective - less economic but more cultural, perhaps-suggests that Africa is coming out of its post-colonial nightmare and that, although there is still a preponderance of deeply undemocratic and oppressive regimes, the real monsters that we have seen in the past 50 years are becoming few and far between. There is still Mugabe and Congo is still in an appalling state and so on, but you feel that Africa has turned the corner. Why do you feel that?

RD: What I think is that the core of Africa's problem goes back to the colonial takeover. Everything feeds back to that, in particular the loss of confidence in Africa's own traditions. I think that colonialism in India was different: by the time the British had left, nobody knew which bits were Indian and which bits were British, because India had absorbed what it wanted from Britain. Whereas in Africa colonialism was there long enough to destroy what went before but not long enough to build something new. Africans were not allowed to lead themselves so there was no political thought and everybody really was reduced to being a peasant. The only way forward was to become like the white man and that was the aspiration. When I first went to Africa, there was this bizarre sight of people parading around in suits with briefcases and bowler hats in villages because they had got some money.

I've just come from Nigeria, which I visited with Chinua Achebe, the novelist. He has been saying again and again: "We have to know who we are in order to move on."

The other key to understanding Africa was again an idea that I picked up from Achebe, which is that independence came very quickly. Nobody really expected it. There was agitation in Ghana, then called the Gold Coast, but in Nigeria there was very little indeed. In lots of countries there was none at all because people accepted things the way they were. Then suddenly they were pitched into independence when they had played no part in creating those countries. Those countries were drawn on the map in the 19th century by people who had never even been there. They sat in London, Paris or Berlin and just drew lines on maps. You had all these different people together, who often spoke completely different languages.