In this post I will refer to descendants of sub-saharan Africans, i.e., black people, as African. By African I don’t mean Egyptians, Algerians or South Africans of European descent. But I do mean Jamaicans and most of the residents of Harlem.
As we look around the world there is the impression that societies that are majority African—whether in Africa or elsewhere—are a mess. Congo, Liberia, Detroit, Haiti, Selma. There are claims that South Africa has become a much worse place to live in for the Africans themselves since the loss of white rule. In America, white flight is understood to be bad thing… the unspoken thesis being that Africans are unable to thrive without whites. The African side of town is always the bad side of town. The difference between the experience of the African community of New Orleans after Katrina and that of the Japanese after the tsunami are stark.
It is rather easy to come to the conclusion that there is something about Africans that makes them incapable of creating a decent community. But maybe this is a fault of information and emphasis. Maybe there are fine well-ordered pleasant communities rivaling Switzerland established by Africans that we just don’t hear about. Are there? Are there any examples?
I feel the need to add that this not a rhetorical question. It is not a backhanded statement of African inferiority. I am genuinely asking this question because I would like to know the answer, which I hope is in the affirmative.
I feel the need to add that this not a rhetorical question. It is not a backhanded statement of African inferiority. I am genuinely asking this question because I would like to know the answer, which I hope is in the affirmative.
Apart from two tweets, what the hell are you referring to? I forgot I had ever even used twitter before. But I’m a heavy drinker and sometimes post stupid shit when I’m drunk.
TGWATY, btw, is the initialism of The Goat With A Thousand Young from Lovecraft. I first used that name on Christian message boards when I was trolling them. Sometimes I’ve been a bad boy on the web but not here. Never on this site.
Yes, there are. Lots of them, from neighbourhoods in the USA to entire countries (e.g. Botswana). It would be easier to point them out if it weren’t for European colonial powers and first-world interference in Africa and the Caribbean, muddling up the data set.
Woulda been better to just ask “What are the most stable/peaceful/wealthy African countries?” and leave the baggage at home if the question is truly an honest one.
Bermuda’s expensive as hell, and can be kind of “small town parochial”, but from what I hear it’s not a bad place to live. The same is true for a lot of the majority black Carribean islands…St. Kits and Nevis, Antigua, Grenada, the US and British Virgin Islands.
And there are a bunch of African countries that sort of fall into that general “middle income nation” thing…Kenya, South Africa, Cameroon, Namibia, Zambia, Gabon, Cote d’Ivorie, etc. Really, very little of Africa is the kind of dystopian hellhole you seem to think.
First off, we need to have a control group. What’s a majority black society that doesn’t have a history of being enslaved and/or colonized by white people?
If we can’t find a group of black people who weren’t historically screwed over by white people, we can’t form conclusions about how black societies would have developed on their own.
Ghana in particular is known and celebrated for it’s stability and lack of corruption. There are plenty of wealthy and high quality African American communities in the US – in my area, Prince George county, MD, stands out. There are many more in MD, CA, GA, and elsewhere.
This kind of attitude is just attributing special and magical properties to “now”. 150 years ago, it would be easy to say the same thing about Chinese people, or Indian people – 800 years ago, about European people. But it wasn’t true then and isn’t true now – if some groups seem to be doing better or worse at a given time, it’s always been about circumstances of geography, politics, and history, not because of genetics. The black African Nubians/Kushites didn’t dominate Egypt for a century or two because of superior genetics – it was because of local geopolitical circumstances. The Haya tribe of Tanzania weren’t the first humans to invent carbon steel because of superior genetics – they just happened to have a person or group of people with great ingenuity at the time, along with a probable need for high-quality metal implements. The British Empire didn’t dominate China and India for decades, including terribly mismatched military forces, because of superior genetics, but because they happened to have superior military and administrative practices at that time.
If we dropped modern Ghana into 16th century Africa, we’d soon be speaking of a Ghanaian Empire utterly dominating the world. Same with if we dropped modern Harlem into 18th century Manhattan Island. It’s not about genetics; it’s about the intricacies of geopolitics, culture, and history, that happen to favor one particular group at a given time over another. It’s always been this way.
How about any African, pre caucasian invasion community?
I am pretty sure they were doing quite well, and were very decent communities to live in
before someone else decided to poke their finger in them.
Same can be said for oh lets say Native american societies, Hawaii, etc etc.