I know there many contries in Africa that are fine and are very well off. I’m talking about the parts where people are dying of AIDS, hunger, malnutrition, where there are warring factions, piracy, etc. Have these things always been around and just not known so worldwide, or did something(s) happen that made things the way they are? For example did the exporting of people for slave labor cause an economic crash that lasted hundreds of years?
Please cure me of this ignorance.
Well there is a book that blames all of the Congo’s problems on King Leopold. Must of been OK before him.
Some problems, like Malaria and Schistosomiasis, have always been around. Other diseases, like AIDS, are new of course. A lot of Africas problems come from the population boom that started in the 50’s. The developed nations began bringing better health care and agricultural techniques to Africa to cure the miserable standard of living. In an occurrence of historic irony, this has resulted in more people which exacerbates most every other problem. Another aspect of the post-war environment was the independence movement that was freeing Africa from the imperialist powers. So although they are free of outsiders who care nothing but for what can be squeezed out of the locals, they are also free of a major stabilizing force that kept a lid on tribal and local conflicts.
A third factor is that Africa was a battle ground for capitalism and communism. Both sides sent aid in the form of development schemes, material and economic aid and such. Most of these things failed. What didn’t fail? What one import has kept on working as designed all these years? The AK-47. All the tractors, factories, and business plans brought in by foreigners over the years broke down without routine maintenance. But not the AK. Or the RPG-7 for that matter. So the tools of mayhem have kept on churning out death while all the devices of order and prosperity have withered and cracked.
So most of the current problems Africa faces began in ernest around the 50’s.
How Africa is now is how the entire world used to be until fairly recently. Famines, plagues, pirates, massacres, corruption, greedy local strongmen exploiting the peasants, etc. Africa has just had the misfortune to be at the tail end of a variety of political and scientific advances that have lifted most of the rest of the world out that swamp.
After reading about Leo I can see how killing a few million people would have a negative impact.
Which countries are those? I don’t believe that there are any countries in Africa which meet that criteria.
Cite?
Leopold’s personally-owned Congo Free State was one of the most brutal and exploitative colonial regimes in Africa, so bad that the Belgian government eventually forced him to turn it over them. The Belgian government’s own assessment concluded that half the population of the territory may have died during Leopold’s administration.
Whatever the situation in the region was before Leopold came along, it was surely worse afterward.
Agreed. Read some history. Africa isn’t uniquely shitty, it’s just that lots of other places have laboriously and fitfully managed to not be quite so shitty as they used to be.
King Leopold’s Ghost is the book I think he’s talking about
I think part of it is just that we lump Africa together when it may not always necessarily make sense to do so. Our high-latitude centric map projections often don’t to Africa justice in terms of how big it is-- it’s not that much smaller than Asia, but doesn’t have as many huge tracts of unpopulated land.
So what happens is if there’s trouble one year in Somalia and Zimbabwe the next and Liberia the one after, all those things get lumped in our mind as “trouble in Africa” even though those countries are geographically distant and not all that related culturally or economically. Whereas if there’s trouble in Pakistan one year and in Myanmar the next, it doesn’t get called “trouble in Asia” even though Pakistan and Myanmar are much closer together than Somalia and Liberia, for example.
That’s not to say that there aren’t endemic problems lingering from colonialism, but those problems exist in other parts of the world as well. It’s just that Africa is a continent made up of many such regions, and so at any given time there’s usually major problems somewhere on the continent but we never think about the other parts of the continent that are quiet.
We did a very similar thread to this about a year ago. No Sub-Saharan country could be considered “very well off” by first-world standards, but Gabon, Namibia, South Africa, and Botswana are doing moderately well — comparable to, say, the Phillipines or Sri Lanka in terms of human development.
Many parts of Africa have many persistant and pervasive problems, and their root causes are myriad.
But remember, Africa is huge. The US, China, and all of Western Europe would fit into it and still leave room for India and Argentina. It has a billion people in 61 countries, and the vast majority of the world’s genetic diversity. It’s absurd to generalize.
Most of Africa is not at war. Most of Africa is not starving. If you landed in some random place in Africa, you’d have a 95% chance of landing in a relatively decent place. There are only a a handful of states- and even then it’s often confined to specific regions- where you wouldn’t want to go on a nice holiday. Most of the continent are peaceful farmers enjoying their family life in a way that is not much different that we lived a few generations back. Your great-great-grandma would likely feel more at home in a random part of Africa than she would here now.
This. There are people on this board who remember when Europe was beset with genocide, war, authoritarianism and disease. Oxfam was formed to save starving children…in Greece. Asia’s rise is even more recent. In the early 60s, people in China were literally eating tree bark and dirt to survive. It wasn’t that long ago that Asia came to the tongue as the definition of abject poverty like Africa does now.
There have been some setbacks- AIDS causes more problems than just death and disease, it also saps an economy of who should be it’s most productive workers. Malaria’s resurgence has a similar effect. But for the most part, things have gotten better. Literacy is rising, and people are going to school in unprecedented numbers. Child mortality is at an all time low, and life expectancy is rising. Guinea worm is on track for eradication, AIDS is being successfully treated, and people are starting to talk seriously about ending malaria for good. It’s a good time to be African.
All of us, I hope. Maybe not Qin.
or, to belabour the point: Africa’s (non-disease related) problems are hardly unique to Africa.
Africa was always tribal, but the Europeans came, conquered put these countries together that had no reason to be and then, eventually, departed leaving the current mess behind them. Leopold may well have been the worst, but none of the Europeans were benign.
FWIW, yesterday’s Science Times (NY Times Tuesday science section) had a little item that mentioned that poor women growing up in Africa today are shorter than their mothers, which is presumably due to malnutrition. One can speculate about the reasons for this, but it suggests that in some respects conditions are getting worse.
Except when it wasn’t. Primitivist bullshit.
False. Social organizations we would call “tribal” did prevail in many areas of the continent, but Africa is huuuuge. It is the second-largest continent at almost 12 million square miles, or almost 3 times the size of Europe. The combination of the “standard” Mercator map and the eurocentric history we learn tends to obscure the diversity and importance of African history.
Africa has had as many different social organizational fabrics in its history as Europe. A very abbreviated list would include such entities as the Kingdom of Zimbabwe; indistinguishable in organization from any contemporary medieval European kingdom. The North African caliphates in the 8th through the 13th centuries were more advanced than their feudal European rivals and in fact conquered nearly all of Spain and Portugal. Ethiopia ruled an empire in the Horn of Africa almost as large as Mexico continuously from the early 12th century until 1936, including fighting off several European attempted land-grabs.
To say that Africa was “always tribal” is as bad as saying Europe was “always organized as nation-states.”
