Wade, Magatte

Senegalese entrepreneur, founder of a hibiscus-beverage and skincare company, head of the Atlas Network's Africa Center for Prosperity

Magatte Wade: Africa, Capitalism, Communism, and the Future of Humanity

Lex Fridman Podcast · Aug 13, 2022

• Magatte Wade
• Senegal and Pan-Africanism
• economic freedom and prosperity
• entrepreneurship and regulatory friction
• colonialism and African independence movements
• charter cities and startup cities
• Black Lives Matter and critical race theory critique
• unconscious bias science
• Ukraine war and African neutrality
• grief and entrepreneurial resilience

Core ideas

Wade opens by describing "Taranga," the Wolof concept of hospitality she says defines Senegalese culture, and draws a parallel to Austin's own culture of warmth versus what she experienced as a more calculating, status-conscious social atmosphere in San Francisco — while voicing concern that rising prosperity could erode Austin's openness the way she believes it did in San Francisco, and citing local affordable-housing advocacy (naming Nicole Nosek) as a needed counterweight rooted in supply-side, deregulatory economic reasoning rather than restrictive zoning. Asked what unites Africa as one place versus many, she points first to humanity's shared African origins, then to the shared trauma of the transatlantic slave trade and colonization (citing "doors of no return" memorial sites), and to the Pan-African political movement (naming Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, Léopold Senghor, and others) as a real but contested unifying force — while also describing resentment toward institutions like the World Bank and IMF, which many of her Pan-African peers regard as neo-imperialist, as a genuine and in her view partly justified sentiment stemming from colonial-era border-drawing and continued external influence over African development paths.

The central argument of the conversation is Wade's account of her own intellectual journey — starting as a child moving from Senegal to Germany and being struck not by wealth per se but by the basic ease of everyday infrastructure (running hot water, paved roads) — toward the conclusion that the core driver of national prosperity is economic freedom: rule of law, clear and transferable property rights, and a low-friction "toolkit" for entrepreneurs, rather than natural resources, culture, or political system per se (she cites East/West Germany, North/South Korea, and Dubai/Singapore/UK as pairs of similar peoples or comparable free-market results under very different political systems). She explicitly frames this as a personal reversal: she says she once assumed poverty reflected some deficiency in African people or culture (including hearing, and rejecting, racialized IQ-based explanations) before concluding, through building parallel businesses in the U.S. and Senegal, that the difference lay in regulatory environment rather than people. She illustrates this with an extended personal account of bureaucratic friction opening her Senegalese hibiscus-juice business — waiting many months and having to personally lobby local officials for an electricity meter and cable truck, and being required to disclose her product formulation to customs officials to qualify for a raw-material import exemption — arguing that such "senseless laws" (like steep tariffs on imported ingredients she says are needed to keep her product shelf-competitive at retailers like Whole Foods) are the root cause that corruption merely symptomizes, rather than corruption itself being the primary problem.

She recounts starting her company after her first husband's death, describing that period as one of the darkest of her life, and crediting the words of an elderly Senegalese hibiscus grower — who told her that nothing she does can help her deceased husband, but that she could still change everything for the women depending on her business — with pulling her back into the work; she says she suppressed her grief for years afterward by throwing herself into constant work, and later went through a second, deeper depressive period tied to a personal falling-out and to feeling ideologically isolated from a left-leaning social network as her economic views shifted, describing herself during that time as feeling like "a candle in the wind" before her now-husband, Michael Strong (co-founder of the nonprofit FLOW alongside Whole Foods' John Mackey), helped her connect her lived business experience to a formal framework of free-market economics — an encounter she describes as the origin of their relationship and as producing a profound sense of personal liberation.

Framing note: Wade's discussion of racial politics in the U.S. — including Black Lives Matter, critical race theory, and diversity/equity/inclusion programs — represents her own strongly stated, contested political opinions, not settled fact, and is presented here as such. She argues that while she affirms the underlying principle that "black lives matter," she strongly objects to the BLM organization's self-described Marxist/socialist framework, tracing this back to a "fatal mistake" she believes African independence-era leaders made in the 1940s–60s by aligning anti-colonial and civil-rights movements with Marxist ideology (via the 1945 Pan-African Congress in Manchester, involving W.E.B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey) rather than with free-market economics, which she argues produced decades of socialist governance across newly independent African states. She argues economic prosperity, not appeals for sympathy or reparative gestures, is what ultimately earns a group political respect, and criticizes what she calls "anti-racism" figures and diversity programming (naming Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo) as fostering a "victimhood mentality" that saps individual agency, contrasting this with concrete criminal-justice-reform and school-choice efforts (naming Van Jones, Alice Johnson, and Anton Lucky) that she considers more genuinely effective. She separately describes a multi-year personal project studying the cognitive science of unconscious bias (citing University of Wisconsin researchers), framing bias as an evolutionarily adaptive, largely unconscious habit of the brain rather than deliberate malice, and outlining a five-step "bias awareness, replacement, empathy, cultural immersion, connection" model she helped develop as a more constructive alternative to public shaming-based approaches.

On the war in Ukraine, Wade discusses many African nations' abstention from UN votes condemning Russia's invasion as, in her reading, a political assertion of independence from Western geopolitical pressure rather than indifference to the conflict itself, while separately expressing frustration at African leaders publicly requesting grain shipments rather than pursuing food self-sufficiency, given the continent's agricultural land potential. She closes with an extended pitch for "charter cities" or "startup cities" — special free-market/common-law enclaves modeled on Dubai's adoption of British common law for business purposes — as a faster complement to slow, piecemeal national legislative reform, citing this as her current major project, and frames Africa's large, young population as either a historic opportunity or a "ticking time bomb" depending on whether economic reforms succeed in time.

Excerpts