But no one group had the power to take everything, to exterminate all their rivals. Nor did they have the crops and animals Europeans did.
Even if that’s true, that’s NOW. The America that conquered the continent was rabidly monocultural, incapable of tolerating differences.
And now with the standard right wing megalomania. YOU can turn Africa into a wealthy empire, all by yourself because you are a superior being; unlike the lazy filthy subhumans who actually live there. :rolleyes:
YOu dont know the history of the United States at all.
Most people first saw Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, etc. as a vast wasteland.
The other lands with forests on it when we found it also could not be cultivated.
The rest of our lands were deserts and mountains.
Alaska was considered to be a worthless bunch of snow and ice.
Like Africa, America also was not fertile when we first formed the United States.
We “made” it fertile.
A “free” United States of Africa (with our U.S. Constitution and our Bill of Rights), in addition to being a manufacturing and technological leader of the world, could also become a rich agricultural nation.
All they gotta do is choose to do it.
I wish people would stop making racist comments or trying to bring racism into this topic.
Race has nothing to do with it.
Africa “could” become free, and wealthy, regardless of whatever races or ethnic groups happen to live there.
Because they didn’t regard the people who already lived there as human.
And the Indians didn’t cultivate them…because they didn’t have crop plants to grow there, or domesticated animals to pull plows and such. They didn’t have genetic engineering labs; they couldn’t make plants and animals that didn’t exist. Europe on the other hand lucked out with having multiple easy to domesticate species.
No, America was more fertile then than now, before we damaged so much of the soil and damaged the ecology in general so bad.
Garbage. It would pretty much instantly fall into civil war or brutal tyranny or both; they just don’t have enough in common to be a nation. The history of colonialism has demonstrated that these slapped together artificial nations just aren’t stable; in fact you are pushing for a repeat of one of the errors that made Africa the mess it is.
Sneering at entire ethic groups as “lazy” and “stupid” is classic racism. Your beliefs are racist, regardless of whether you like the label.
I would think that anyone given a whole continent would be a bit on the wealthy side.
Seems like a truism to me. Give me a whole bunch of stuff and I will have… a whole bunch of stuff! Go me!
(You’re doing it “right”.)
You should come to the United States sometime and see what we did with Florida.
It used to be just a big 'ole bug infested swamp.
The people of Africa could do the same thing with Africa if they chose to do so.
Yeah, through sheeeer willpower. :rolleyes:
And what makes you think I’m not American? It says “California” right there.
Hi Susanann,
Welcome to the Straight Dope. I look forward to many of your posts.
A bit of advice…you’re debating against nonsense, above. Don’t waste your time.
There are some good debaters on the left side of the spectrum on the SDMB like
and a few others. They are actually smart and think about what they write before they tap the keyboard. See if you can engage them in a debate. They’re good.
Susanann has only made one really good point–corrupt government. Kleptocracy is a major stumbling block for any & all sub-Sarahan nations.
The lack of stable classical nations could be linked to limited literacy in the Golden Age of Africa. Sadly, paper, parchment, cloth & bark do not hold up welll, against high humidity & termites, both of which abound in Africa.
Note that Timbuktu was located in a drier area, & this may have had some influence.
I copy that!
Check, and double check!
Thanks!
Don’t just assert that it’s nonsense. Prove it with your vast knowledge of development issues in Africa.
I lived in Africa for 3 years, although I would never claim to be an expert on development issues. My comments would spring forth mostly from my interactions with the local populace, mostly in the Orange Free State around the Bloemfontein region and T’ban Nchu (a former homeland). Hope I spelled that correctly…I’m doing it from memory.
My comment was more directed to the posters Susanann was debating against.
Why thank you, even sven; I have read that.
“Rich, learned empires that lasted for thousands of years”? Hmmm…to me that seems like a bit of an optimistic assessment and I still contend the farther south in Africa you go, the more optimistic it is, particularly if you want to give proof cases of the core issue here: high cognitive skills underpinning that civilization.
But OK; I have no real interest in putting down African history. If you and Tom want to argue the sub-saharan civilizations achieved on a par with what was achieved elsewhere, as I said before–have at it.
Now that we have a lot more mobility of populations, it seems like it’s a better comparison to have them competing against one another head to head, so to speak, and that data (rather than just the vicissitudes of history) is what I find more compelling in the basic debate at hand–genetic luck versus environmental luck.
OK. I have had it with the straw man arguments and the mischaracterizations of what I have posted. If you cannot actually address what has been posted, then I am going to begin believing those posters who keep asserting that you really are just looking for ways to post racist nonsense–a point that I have not accepted until now.
Yep. Norman Vincent Peale meets Leni Riefenstahl for a cup of wishful thinking with a heaping spoonful of ignorance.
by even sven:
“It is true that in the past Africa was not that different than the rest of the world…They had rich, learned empires that lasted for thousands of freaking years and still exist today.-”
by tomndebb:
“Your claims about sub-Saharan empires are meaningless from any perspective.”*
*I assume, my claims that sub-saharan empires were not as cognitively sophisticated as others in the rest of the world to a given date…
As I understand it, your claim is that modern civilizations are so recent over the entire scope of human history that a pretense of significance in comparing any of them is premature. It may be a fair point, but I don’t understand your consternation over my viewpoint. I may have misinterpreted your use of the term “meaningless” to mean you were taking the opposite viewpoint from me on the relative sophistication of African civilizations.
If you do agree that sub-saharan civilizations have been relatively primitive compared to civilizations elsewhere, perhaps you could say that less obliquely, and I apologize about misconstruing your point. I am not sure even sven would agree with you but perhaps I have not understood her point either.
I reiterate my prior point that playing World’s Best Civilization distracts from more fundamental data points over population differences, and the mobility of current populations allows for more direct and precise comparisons.
Some say that Africa needs is a strongman that is really strong enough to do something good with his country, even if he has to kill a million people to do it.
In the real world, the end result of that is a million corpses and a nation as bad or worse as it ever was. One thing Africa isn’t short of is strongmen.