Why does Africa suffer?

Great Debates
21

[QUOTE=NineToTheSky]
Why is it that most African countries below the Sahara are in such a terrible state? By almost every yardstick most of them are suffering. In terms of politics, economics and human rights, they are below the standards that we would find acceptable. Is it to do with the climate? Is it to do with the consequences of colonial rule? Is it because of tribal cultures? I’ve never understood.
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If you are seriously asking this question, I would ask you to consider the hypothesis that (generally speaking) people in sub-Saharan Africa are less intelligent than people in the rest of the world.

Most people reject this idea (at least publicly) because it’s so offensive. But still, it would seem to fit the facts pretty well.

22

How does it “fit the facts”? - what’s intelligence got to do with poverty, or human rights?

23

[QUOTE=brazil84]
If you are seriously asking this question, I would ask you to consider the hypothesis that (generally speaking) people in sub-Saharan Africa are less intelligent than people in the rest of the world.

Most people reject this idea (at least publicly) because it’s so offensive. But still, it would seem to fit the facts pretty well.
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But what are the facts?

People are extrapolating a heck of a lot from what is, let’s be honest, a rather short period of human history. Africa’s a relative shithole NOW, but you can pick any number of points in history when Europe was even worse, when China was a wreck, so on and so forth. Why is the political and economic situation of 2008 indicative of relative intelligence, but not of 908? or 1200 BC? Surely our intelligence doesn’t change that quickly?

24

How much of Africa was actually colonized? By that I mean a significant part of the population coming from elsewhere (ie, Europe)? Obviously South Africa fits that bill, but wasn’t most of sub-S Africa ruled by a small elite governing class, mostly civil servant types, with not a lot of farmers/tradesmen/etc coming in to settle?

Waves and waves of immigrants came to North and South America, and in what is now the US most of the native population was destroyed. Although many of the natives in parts settled by Spain were killed (or died of diseases) many countries south of the US maintain a very large native or mixed population today. I can’t see a parallel with this over much of Africa. Perhaps in some of the eastern part there was a similar process driven by the Arabs…?

25

Islam and Christianity are ethnicities now? :dubious:

26

[QUOTE=RickJay]
But what are the facts?

People are extrapolating a heck of a lot from what is, let’s be honest, a rather short period of human history. Africa’s a relative shithole NOW, but you can pick any number of points in history when Europe was even worse, when China was a wreck, so on and so forth. Why is the political and economic situation of 2008 indicative of relative intelligence, but not of 908? or 1200 BC?
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It’s kind of hard to know the relative shitiness of Africa, Europe, and Asia in 1000 BC. Probably they were all pretty shitty by the standards of today, but that doesn’t answer the question.

And by the way, I do think that intelligence can change relatively quickly. For one thing, improved nutrition could have a pretty big impact in a generation or two. Microevolution would obviously be slower, but it may very well have a noticeable impact over 50 generations.

Such a process has been hypothesized for Ashkenazi Jews.

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[QUOTE=brazil84]
It’s kind of hard to know the relative shitiness of Africa, Europe, and Asia in 1000 BC. Probably they were all pretty shitty by the standards of today, but that doesn’t answer the question.

And by the way, I do think that intelligence can change relatively quickly. For one thing, improved nutrition could have a pretty big impact in a generation or two. Microevolution would obviously be slower, but it may very well have a noticeable impact over 50 generations.

Such a process has been hypothesized for Ashkenazi Jews.
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Wait, what has been hypothesized for Ashkenazi? That better nutrition has increased their intelligence? Fairly vague, I’d say.

Africa got dealt a pretty tough hand. So many ways to die, so people don’t have much time or energy for anything beyond survival.

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[QUOTE=Great Dave]
Wait, what has been hypothesized for Ashkenazi? That better nutrition has increased their intelligence?
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That there was a selection process over 1000 years or so.

http://homepage.mac.com/harpend/.Public/AshkenaziIQ.jbiosocsci.pdf

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[QUOTE=brazil84]
If you are seriously asking this question, I would ask you to consider the hypothesis that (generally speaking) people in sub-Saharan Africa are less intelligent than people in the rest of the world.

Most people reject this idea (at least publicly) because it’s so offensive. But still, it would seem to fit the facts pretty well.
[/QUOTE]
But other aspects of the situations “fit the facts” much better.

Asian colonialism resulted in established nations being conquered and then administered by foreign powers, leaving the cultures generally intact.

South American colonialism resulted in massive numbers of deaths among the local population, pretty much wiping out the original cultures that were then re-established as a new fusion of European and Indian populations relying on established cultures (at least for political and economic structures) imported from Europe.

African colonialism occurred in separate waves, with each having a dfferent effect on the region colonized. Northern Africa resembled Asian colonization. Southern African colonization resembled that in South America. Central African colonization was a separate thing altogether, where old cultures were destroyed (and rival societies arbitrarily merged), and no real new culture was permitted to develop. On top of that, millions of Africans were ripped from their homes and lives and simply shipped away.

In each case, those countries which suffered the least cultural disruption have done best, those that have had new cultures imposed on them have survived, but not easily, and those cultures that have been seriously disrupted or destroyed have suffered the worst.

Given that people who attempt to measure intelligence cannot even agree on the best way to do that (or even how best to define intelligence), it seems rather pointless to try to assign the failures of different societies to their respective (and never adequately defined or measured) intelligence when there is a pretty clear correlation between societal disruption and later success.

30

[QUOTE=Great Dave]
Wait, what has been hypothesized for Ashkenazi? That better nutrition has increased their intelligence? Fairly vague, I’d say.
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More that constant persecution required them to stay on their toes, such that only the best and brightest survived. This then has been posited as the reason such a disproportionate number ( relative to percentage of population ) of successful people in modern, western society have been Jewish.

It’s an interesting hypothesis, but one I find more than a little dubious myself. For one thing teasing out ( or even defining ) innate biological intelligence as distinct from cultural factors is so difficult as to verge on the impossible. But YMMV.

Yup. Geography gave sub-Saharan Africa a pretty solid kick in the nuts, even before colonial abuses added a layer of chaos.

31

[QUOTE=MikeG]
Don’t forget almost no navigable rivers. Seems quaint but both Europe and the Eastern US have an excellent network of rivers.
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The one part of Africa that does have a river, the Nile, spawned both Egyptian & Classical Sudanese civilizations.

32

[QUOTE=Bosda Di’Chi of Tricor]
The one part of Africa that does have a river, the Nile, spawned both Egyptian & Classical Sudanese civilizations.
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I’d re-write that- drop the initial “The”. There are other rivers in Africa. The Nile is the longest and most well known, of course, but there’s also the Congo, the Niger, the Gambia, just off the top of my head.

33

[QUOTE=tomndebb]
But other aspects of the situations “fit the facts” much better.

Asian colonialism resulted in established nations being conquered and then administered by foreign powers, leaving the cultures generally intact.

South American colonialism resulted in massive numbers of deaths among the local population, pretty much wiping out the original cultures that were then re-established as a new fusion of European and Indian populations relying on established cultures (at least for political and economic structures) imported from Europe.

African colonialism occurred in separate waves, with each having a dfferent effect on the region colonized. Northern Africa resembled Asian colonization. Southern African colonization resembled that in South America. Central African colonization was a separate thing altogether, where old cultures were destroyed (and rival societies arbitrarily merged), and no real new culture was permitted to develop. On top of that, millions of Africans were ripped from their homes and lives and simply shipped away.

In each case, those countries which suffered the least cultural disruption have done best, those that have had new cultures imposed on them have survived, but not easily, and those cultures that have been seriously disrupted or destroyed have suffered the worst.
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How would one objectively assess the amount of cultural disruption?

34

[QUOTE=Little Nemo]
I’d make the comparison between Africa and South America. If less than a hundred years of colonialism ruined Africa, why didn’t over three hundred years of colonialism destroy South America?
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I would say because in Africa, the colonial powers failed to utterly wipe out the indiginous people and replace them with white colonists, as they did in the New World. When the whites abandoned power or were kicked out, the Africans fell on each other fighting over the ruins.

35

[QUOTE=Tamerlane]
More that constant persecution required them to stay on their toes, such that only the best and brightest survived. This then has been posited as the reason such a disproportionate number ( relative to percentage of population ) of successful people in modern, western society have been Jewish.

It’s an interesting hypothesis, but one I find more than a little dubious myself. For one thing teasing out ( or even defining ) innate biological intelligence as distinct from cultural factors is so difficult as to verge on the impossible. But YMMV.

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The hypothesis I’ve seen was that it was due to their being confined to certain professions which required intelligence, rather than a general persecution of the population. Not sure I buy that hypothesis either, but that’s been floating around for awhile.

36

It’s possible to get so involved in quibbling over small details that you lose sight of the overall situation. While there was some very minor European colonialism on the fringes of Africa prior to the nineteenth century, the reality is that less than ten percent of sub-Saharan Africa was part of a European colony in 1875. And less than ten percent of sub-Saharan Africa was part of a European colony in 1975 as well.

African imperialism was a Hobbesian phenomena: nasty, brutish and short.

37

I’ll never understand why people bring up the fact that Europe was backwards hundreds and hundreds of years ago in these kind of arguments. That was then, this is now. The point is that Africa is fucked up NOW. We have modern technology and medicine and communications and everything NOW, and the fact that Europe had the Dark Ages doesn’t make any difference.

38

I’m surprised that no one has mentioned Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs, and Steel”. So I did.

39

[QUOTE=John Mace]
The hypothesis I’ve seen was that it was due to their being confined to certain professions which required intelligence, rather than a general persecution of the population. Not sure I buy that hypothesis either, but that’s been floating around for awhile.
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Yeah, but I find this one even more squirrely. My understanding is that most pre-modern Jews ( like most Europeans generally ) were simple peasants.

[QUOTE=Little Nemo]
While there was some very minor European colonialism on the fringes of Africa prior to the nineteenth century, the reality is that less than ten percent of sub-Saharan Africa was part of a European colony in 1875.
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Yes, but the European influence pre-1875 was vastly disproportionate to the actual real estate they dominated. In order to advance the argument that Europeans ( and Arabs ) had minimal impact on Africa between, say, 1500 and 1875, you have to ignore the elephant in the room - the African slave trade and its profound ( if much debated in its particulars ) demographic impact.

40

[QUOTE=brazil84]
How would one objectively assess the amount of cultural disruption?
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Well, one might look at cultural features.

Do the current inhabitants speak the same languages and practice the same religions as the inhabitants of the same regions in 1490? Are the traditions regarding marriage, inheritance, child rearing, and other familial phenomena more similar or more dissimilar to the practices in 1490? Do laws and economics follow traditions current in 1490 (with appropriate allowances for general development and evolution), or is there a hodge-podge of conflicting situations in which a legal system has one set of rules on the books while the population in its day-to-day existence carries out acts of “justice” in some different manner?

Conversely, how would one objectively assess intelligence?

[QUOTE=Argent Towers]
I’ll never understand why people bring up the fact that Europe was backwards hundreds and hundreds of years ago in these kind of arguments. That was then, this is now. The point is that Africa is fucked up NOW. We have modern technology and medicine and communications and everything NOW, and the fact that Europe had the Dark Ages doesn’t make any difference.
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The point is that every region of the world has a different history. Given that humanity (in some form) is 200,000 years old, the differences in benchmarks for technological progress (or even the progress of law, politics, and economics) that differs by a matter of a few hundred years is within a small margin of error within human history. If (for example) we pursue brazil84’s suggestion of differing intelligences among populations, then a look at history seems to indicate that Europeans were dumber than Western Asians until around the fifth cunrutry, B.C.E., then Europeans got a lot smarter than the Western Asians for a while, but got stupider again around the fifth century while Western Asians began to get smart, but then Western Asians began to get stupid just about the time that Europeans began to get smarter, again. Meanwhile, China displayed fantastic intelligence right up until the time that the Brits cut the Grand Canal, then they gort stupid again until shortly after Nixon went to China.

If you don’t decide to pursue intelligence as a cause, then the same exaples of superiority and inferiority still follow the same patterns in history. Pointing out that Europeans had a period in which they were every bit as backward as any other group in the world is simply a way of pointing out that any claims for innate superiority seriously stumble on the facts of history.

= = =

Similar situations can be observed in comparisons of political development between Europe and Western Asia. It may be comforting to some to believe that Europeans are in some way superior to Western Asians, inasmuch as the Europeans have (relatively) stable democracies rather than clans and tribes and strong man dictators. However, that ignores the fact that between the Magna Carta and the 2006 election, the English speaking peoples fought numous civil wars in which the results of “elections” (at one level or another) were challenged at the points of halberds and the mouths of muskets before we finally got in the habit of accepting election results without going to war to change them. (Heck, Europe had more autocracies than democracies at the time the the Nazis took power in Germany and many of the elections that followed the political reorganization following 1918 were swept away in civil wars.) Societies that have not yet gone through the same labor pains have not yet given birth to democratic traditions. This does not mean that they are innately inferior, only that they are on a different milestone on the route from autocracy to democracy.