Reasons Africa is "lagging behind"?

Great Debates
61

Okay, well the success of what you term “Europe” was really influenced by Middle Eastern populations such as the Israelites, and the scholasticism in Oxford and the British empire (for example) was heavily contributed to by Christian learning and trans-Turkic trade with the Middle Eastern populations.

To begin with, you are wrong. Islam spread to West Africa at approximately the same time as it spread to North Africa, the 700’s. Islam is no more “authentic” to North Africa than it is to West Africa. Both pretty much got hit by branches of the same wave. What you are asserting is like saying that Japan is basically a rip off of Tibet because they both practice Buddhism.

In practical terms, North Africa’s influence on West Africa has been severely limited by that big huge desert that basically only the Tuaregs could cross- and the Tuaregs are not a particularly shining example of orthodox Arab-style Islam. They tend towards a synergistic semi-animist strain full of it’s own unique complexities. They were not telling anyone to build libraries.

While it is a diverse and cosmopolitan place with all kinds of influences, through the centuries, West Africa has developed it’s own Islamic culture and practice that is distinct from Arab culture. Nobody is ever going to go to Djenne and think they are in Casablanca. Islam has blended with local cultures to create something that is uniquely West African. The music, the clothing, the customs, the way of governing, the celebrations…they are all different. West Africa is it’s own thing, not some kind of fake-o Arab culture. While Islam was no doubt a positive influence on their ability to develop advanced empires, that doesn’t make anything any less African. It’s not like there was some kind of Arab overlord orchestrating the whole thing.

Anyway, West Africa- pretty much all of West Africa that was not impassible desert or malarial jungle- had a pretty darn fine imperial age. They had rich, learned empires that lasted for thousands of freaking years and still exist today. You can’t tell me that just being kind of near Arabs is enough to make an empire last for centuries. Why is it so hard to admit that they had some golden times?

Here is the Wikipedia page about Africa’s empires. Try reading it and learning something. African empires - Wikipedia

62

I don’t know much about the rest of Africa, but you can certainly talk about West African culture, which through conquest and empire-building has developed a distinct and surprisingly uniform culture. Across that huge swatch, from desert to sea and from sea to forest, you see the same things.

After living in North Cameroon, I was surprised that I felt far more at home in distant Bamako than I did in the Cameroonian capital of Yaounde, which has a more Central African culture. When I share stories with people who lived in Togo or Benin, we are on the same ground. West Africa does indeed have a common religion- Islam. While people haven’t seriously used Arabic as a scholarly language since the middle ages, Pulaar and it’s variants are widely spoken from Mauritania to Sudan. I was able to walk into remote Malian villages where people didn’t even speak French and communicate with my Cameroonian Pulaar. The Fulbe were better cultural colonizers than the French could ever dream of being.

The difference between, say, Senegal and Nigeria is probably far less than the difference between the Netherlands and Spain.

63

I certainly did not say that.

It is true that in the past Africa was not that different than the rest of the world- The average person scratched out a living on a farm, birthed and buried a pile of kids, and paid tributes to the local warlord/chief/lord/whatever. A smaller portion of people lived in crowded disease-ridden cities where they engaged in trade and light manufacturing. The elites had lots of shiny stuff and occasionally put on a war. After a certain point the big evangelical religions began to overpower and get mixed up with local beliefs. People were really into believing in witches.

You seem to forget that even individual European countries have not been unified that long. Not long ago places like Germany and Italy were just loose alliances of local warlords. We call the “Ibo” a tribe, and we call the “Catalonians” something else, but it boils down to the same thing. Feudalism ruled- and Africa had pretty much the exact same feudal system. Huge areas- like much of what is now Russia- remained sparsely populated and poorly explored because the climate sucked…kind of like a lot of Africa. Perhaps these moments of development were not perfectly lined up across the continents, but if you brought a Russian serf from 1400 and had him trade place with an African serf from 1400, I don’t think it’d be that big of a downgrade in standard of living.

I do not believe that without colonialism Africa would have developed exactly the same as Europe and have never said that. Africa has some massive climate challenges that would make that nearly impossible. Europe developed technology that probably would not have developed in Africa for a number of reasons.

I don’t think it’s accurate to say that Africa degraded into a uniquely wretched state. For the average person, things didn’t really go downhill as much as they just didn’t move forward. For most of history famine, ignorance and disease was the norm. Life, historically, is tough. It just never stopped being tough in much of Africa. Many places are in a bit of a middle-ages time warp.

I gravitate towards the middle ages because that is what it felt like to me. Living in Cameroon felt oddly familiar, and it took me a bit to realize that it was because it felt like a fairly tale. I was friends with the baker, the tailor and the brewer. I knew bored princes that would pose as commoners for a bit of fun, and princess who hated being locked up in seclusion. People worried about witches and poisoned wells. The rich guy down the street got all his money from an enchanted parrot who guarded a magic ring. It was right out of the pages of Grimm’s.

Anyway, where colonialism and the Cold War come in is that they took the already difficult situation of this level of development and gave it bigger guns and higher stakes. What would normally be a family feud could become a genocide. The greedy kings suddenly got oil and diamonds to plunder.

64

Everybody is overlooking the obvious and making up excuses.

Africa today is no less developed, no less unsettled, no less full of forests or deserts, or no less poor than America was back in the 1600’s.

Like the United States, Africa has a pretty good climate with long growing seasons, it is just chocked full of natural resources, it has wonderful tourist spots and beaches, it has plenty of people that could become workers in manufacturing plants.

The japanese, even today, would ABSOLUTELY DIE!!! with envy to get the climate, natural resources, tourist spots, and millions of acres of undeveloped land that is there for the taking in Africa.

The only reason the people of Africa are not as wealthy as the United States is the people themselves.

If individual states in Africa “united” the way the states united in America, if “The United States of Africa” then adopted a Constitution and Bill of Rights exactly the same as America, if the people in africa were as industrious and hard working as Americans , if they built roads,railroads, bridges, dams, refineries, nuclear power plants, steel mills, manufacturing plants, etc as was done in America, then Africa could easily contend for the wealthiest,strongest, most free country on earth …if only they so desired.

The only reason Africa has not done all this, and the reason Africa is poor, has limited personal freedoms, has a corrupt government, is because the African people choose to be…and dont let anybody fool you into thinking other wise.

65

You know, we are supposed to be fighting ignorance, not fighting to spread it.

Pretending that the U.S. is all wonderful just because we “want” it to be is one demonstration of ignorance. The U.S. is as much a result of its history (and pre-history) as any other place. The same holds true for Africa–or Europe or Asia, (East and West), or the rest of the Americas or Australia and Oceania.

I don’t know whether you are actually peddling some of Norman Vincent Peale’s power of positive thinking or Leni Riefenstahl’s triumph of will, but you clearly have no idea what you are talking about.

66

The idea that different human populations may possess different intellectual capacities or inclinations is milquetoast. The problem the self styled race realists run into is they have evidence of small IQ differences which may or may not change over time but they try to extrapolate this into some grand story about how it turns out Africans are just so stupid they can barely tie their shoes, let alone govern themselves. There’s a rather large gap there. I doubt everyone losing 10 IQ points would cause America or Europe to collapse into a barren acultural, hyper-irrational hellscape of starvation and internal strife. More than the usual, anyway.

The entire endeavor just seems too parochial (always the blacks), and always leading to winking neo-colonialism. I hope there’s a NAM site out there where they discuss how the West just can’t their act together and how they are going to dismantle our institutions and replace them with an elite cadre of Korean and Indian intellectuals. For our own good, natch.

Interestingly enough (or not), real racists I find don’t tend to think blacks (or Mexicans, or what have you) are actually stupid, just lazy thieving criminals who thirst for deflowering their daughters and taking their jobs.

67

The U.S. literally sat around for hundreds, thousands of years, undeveloped, poor, with its natural resources remaining in the ground, no infrastructure of roads nor railways and no dams, an uncultivated land composed of a mixture of deserts, mountains, snow, swamps, savannas, marshes, prairies, and forests, its people barely eaking out a living eating bugs or hunting animals or by extremely unproductive attempts at farming…until a bunch of people living here finally decided to make it a rich powerful nation with lots of individual freedoms with a government accountable to the people. The United States FINALLY!!! became a rich nation ONLY because its people FINALLY chose to do so.

Africa can choose to do the same thing any time it is ready to decide to do so.

68

So do they “DIE!!!” before or after they get the land? Who exactly do they envy?

So the Japanese really regret living in Japan, and given half the chance would resettle in Chad?

Interesting arguments you have there.

Since you’re an expert on international affairs and world history, when is Russia going to turn into Switzerland? You don’t have to pin it down to the exact year, but I’d like a time frame, at least.

69

You’ve heard of the Mound Builders, yes?

70

The people living there that made the US what it is were already part of rich and powerful nations. They brought hundreds of years of know-how to their colony and simply expanded on that as did their cousins back home. The USA didn’t sprang out of nothing just because some people suddenly decided to knuckle down and get on with stuff. It had a pretty damned good head start.

Besides, the Americas grew quite impressive and had rich nations some time before the British and the French and the Spanish etc popped over, and this happened quite naturally, as it did in Africa with the Egyptian empires etc.

You know, the Romans felt the same way about Britain and much of Europe that some of you seem to feel about Africa. Some places grow faster than others. It happens, and it nothing to do with race.

71

Japan would become UNBELIEVABLY!!! wealthy if they could have the land and natural resources of Africa.

72

The Americas largely stagnated until a bunch of people showed up with domesticated plants and animals the locals didn’t have, and technology they didn’t have, and killed most of the local population via disease. None of which the Africans can do.

And I’m sure the slaves would have found your speeches about all the freedom they had interesting.

73

We agree on 1 thing: it had nothing to do with race.

It had everything to do with choosing to become wealthy.

YOu might want to re-check your history, because the people in the United States transforming this land into the richest county on earth, richer than any other, richer than where they came from, choosing to become wealthy and free came at a time when there was no “know-how”, no airports, no railroads, no Hoover Dams, no computers, no television, etc.

There was no “good start”.

Before we choose to become developed, wealthy, and free, this land was full of bugs, wild animals, forests, swamps, deserts, mountains, and a whole lot of nothing.

74

Ah, the good old “you can get rich if you want to” routine. One of the silliest bits of nonsense out there.

And quite a few people, whom we killed. They did indeed have a good start; a largely depopulated continent they could loot with little serious opposition, and geographic isolation from other major powers.

America, unlike Africa hasn’t been conquered and looted. Nor has it spent centuries with foreign powers deliberately screwing it up, unlike Africa. Nor was one group able to kill off everyone else in Africa and take all their resources like happened in America.

75

Uhh, you are aware that not everyone in Africa speaks the same language and don’t really have anything common to rally around? Just 'cuz they sound the same to you . . .
Unification isn’t going to be some sort of magic bullet economically, either. The richer nations won’t gain anything of value, and will be swamped with* literally *millions of unskilled immigrants from poorer nations they join with. And the poor nations will still be the same; opening your borders to trade isn’t going to work great if you have nothing on hand to trade. Sure there’s stuff under the ground, but that requires capital to develop. In a general sense, money. Not confidence-building exercises and DVDs of The Secret, but MONEY.

Again, that shit costs money. We bought our dams and power plants when we were in the richest nations on Earth. We got our railroads not by the power of positive thinking, but because our guns got us a very good deal on the land. In Africa, both sides have guns in every dispute, and smallpox is extinct in the wild.

Europe has geographical features that are almost designed to make trade as easy as possible, and happens to be attached to an even bigger continent that invented books and gunpowder. America had land that was free for the taking, as soon as you shot the original inhabitants. What makes Africa different is there are no more free lunches.

“In conclusion the root cause of poverty is lack of money so if they’re poor they should just get more money so they wont be por anymore”

76

  1. YOu need to read some history. American history, even including the wars between indian tribes, has been that of conquer and looting for hundreds of years, by many different countries, by many different indian tribes, before we finally united the states and formed the United States and chose to become wealthy.

  2. The true fact is just the OPPOSITE. There is no “one group” in the United States. In fact, the United States, undistputedly, is the most heterogeneous, the most multi-racial, the most multi-culture, the most ethnically diverse nation in the history of the earth.
    Africa is just sitting out there waiting to be developed and become wealthy.
    Give “me” Africa and I will become the wealthiest person on Earth.

77

  1. YOu need to read some history. American history, even including the wars between indian tribes, has been that of conquer and looting for hundreds of years, by many different countries, by many different indian tribes, before we finally united the states and formed the United States and chose to become wealthy.

  2. The true fact is just the OPPOSITE. There is no “one group” in the United States. In fact, the United States, undistputedly, is the most heterogeneous, the most multi-racial, the most multi-culture, the most ethnically diverse nation in the history of the earth.
    Africa is just sitting out there waiting to be developed and waiting to become wealthy and productive and powerful.
    Give “me” Africa and I will easily and quickly become the wealthiest person on Earth.

78

Erm, no, there was plenty.

Britain was the first industrialised nation in the world, and that spread to America, not the other way around. Do you know who George Stephenson was? Look him up. Look up at the various nationalities of those who contributed to inventing the television. Ever heard of Joseph Marie Jacquard?

Are you saying the USA invented every modern technology, and did so without the knowledge that Europe had been piling together over the centuries? No, the USA had the benefit of Europe’s progression, because the USA was a European colony.

Do you think Australia just knuckled down and built what they have out of nothing too? Is that why they’re not still throwing boomerangs around to hunt for food?

79

The United States was as poor as could be in 1789 when it began as a desitute poor and mostly undeveloped land. We did not have any money.

It does not take money, it merely takes the people choosing to be free and also choosing to become wealthy (and it also helps to be in a land, like Africa, that has plenty of natural resources in the ground).

I look at Africa today and I can see untold wealth and riches just sitting there ready for the taking by the African peoples.

80

Did you read what I wrote? We got incredibly fertile land (and a lot of expensive beaver pelts) at practically no cost, thanks to smallpox.

Yes, but Japan is already lower-case-unbelievably wealthy, on par with the US and EU. We cannot say Paraguay or Cambodia would “become UNBELIEVABLY!!! wealthy if they could have the land and natural resources of Africa.”

Russia – as mentioned earlier – has as much land and natural resources as Africa: check for you.
It also is populated by big strong virile white folk: check for Pedant.
While it is certainly better off than large parts of Africa, it’s still kind of a poohole.

My wild and edgy hypothesis is that answering why one country is rich and another is poor might be way too complicated to boil down to ideology or plainspun Amurrican country wisdom, and even posts ten times as long as tomndebb’s will only be able to elucidate a small glimpse of the underlying causes.