Excellent post, tomndebb.
Throughout most of history, communication was very slow, and ideas spread as slow as pine sap in the winter. It makes sense that across the world, one culture might be quite advanced and another very primitive. But nowadays there’s an unprecedented level of communication. Ideas travel in mere seconds nowadays. Like ideas about HIV and how to spread it, for instance (hint - fucking a virgin isn’t the solution.) It seems like Africa logically should not be so far beneath the standards of the West, with modern communications technology.
Define “Africa” in your context. Do you really think that there are thousands of African university graduates who engage in virgin rape to avoid AIDS? Do you really think thart selecting the worst examples of the least educated portion of the population addresses your issue? Do you really believe that the majority of Africans outside the cities watch CNN or read the Wall Street Journal? Take a look at where most African nations fall on this list of TVs per capita by country. The fact that there may be good communications and education in Johannesburg or Nairobi or Cairo says nothing about the general level of information available to the typical person in a country.
Sorry - I didn’t think it needed mentioning, but obviously all the bit about geography in my first post was after Diamond.
Would you agree that by this standard, places like the Philippines, India, and Algeria have suffered huge amounts of “cultural disruption”?
Philipines and Algeria, sure, but I’m not seeing it with India, I must admit.
Let me give this is a shot.
Sub-Saharan Africa generally lacks the flora and fauna that is conducive to building civilization (grains and beasts and burdens that can be domesticated with ease), more or less explaining their relative lack of technological development. Jared Diamond’s Guns Germs and Steel does a great job of explaining this in a logical, well-researched fashion.
So contact with the expansionist Europeans led to colonization and afterwards when the Europeans left, they kind of sliced up Africa in a careless, haphazard way, without too much consideration for tribal antagonism that is still strong today. So what we are left with is a set of nations without any sense of nationhood, with tribal affiliations that are much stronger than any feeling of national pride. So when a leader from one tribe strong-arms his way into power, he of course oppresses members of the rival tribe, attempt genocide, etc etc. Then of course those that are most needed to develop these countries (the wealthy and educated) leave as soon as they can because they also lacking any sense of nationhood. And seeing the state of that region, who can blame them?
Also, the developed world is wary of investing in those unstable markets (and foreign investment is a must for development of these sorts of nations), though resource hungry China seems to be up for the challenge these days.
This how I’ve come to understand it in extremely simplistic and possibly inaccurate terms.
I should add “navigable”.
By more than dugouts.
If I’m understanding your post correctly, you’re saying that the difference between African and other post-colonial countries today is due to the effect of slave trading from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. You are correct that this was a factor that was mostly unique to Africa but I’d like to hear more about how its effect is still present in Africa today.
You might want to check out this thread:
Well that is a very hard thing to quantify and is one of those areas of contentious debate I mentioned. To be honest I’m not sure how much importance I’d assign it and by that I don’t mean I’d minimize it, I just honestly don’t know.
For example it is speculated that areas heavily affected by the slave trade may have suffered social disruption of a level that it effectively forced societal stagnation. Not only could it have helped reinforce tribal particularism, it may have actually caused a regression towards it in some select cases, along with ethnic splintering.
Beyond the political the argument has also been advanced that it stifled creativity ( possible ), societal productivity ( probable depending on the area ) and technological development ( I have my doubts there, less because of a lack of impact than due to the reciprocal transfer of technology due to the trade itself ).
An economics professor made a recent stab at trying to quantify the above and seems to have concluded that the impact was indeed quite real. His finding that…
According to my calculations, if the slave trades had not occurred, then 72% of the average income gap between Africa and the rest of the world would not exist today, and 99% of the income gap between Africa and the rest of the underdeveloped world would not exist. In terms of economic development, Africa would not look any different from the other developing countries in the world.
…seem suspiciously strong to me. How to tease out the damage from colonial occupation and the general geographic hamstringing sub-Saharan Africa suffers from would seem to me to be rather problematic.
Still it’s food for thought. Article: Home | CEPR
Eh? The thread just says that zebras are hard as hell to even tame. People have attempted to do so with modern techniques and still got fairly poor results. The general consensus (excluding you, no offense) seems to be zebras were difficult and impractical to domesticate.
What came out in the thread was that Diamond was comparing modern zebras with modern horses. i.e. apples and oranges. And that he was comparing sporadic, short lived attempts to domesticate zebras with what were likely long-term, involved attempts to domesticate horses. i.e. apples and oranges.
Africans are poor because they have not been able to leverage capitalism and markets to improve their lives. This is the case because:
[ul]
[li]Scumbag dictators will not allow property rights.[/li][li]Tribalism makes it hard to do business (putting tribe first makes economic choices inefficient)[/li][li]Scumbag first world countries erect barriers to African products, ostensibly in opposition to ‘sweatshops’, but in fact to protect their own local, much wealthier people from competition.[/li][li]The endless series of wars and skirmishes keep destroying whatever infrastructure is built[/li][li]Heavy foreign aid has the effect of propping up dictators and giving them the money and resources needed to buy off their underlings so they can all stay in power. The actual people get very little of it.[/li][/ul]
If you want to help the African people, do this:
[ul]
[li]Drop all tariffs against African products[/li][li]Drop all foreign aid that goes directly to African governments. Instead, provide aid in the form of schooling, medicines, and other goods. Tie the receipt of aid to the acceptance of foreign aid workers who will supervise the distribution of those goods, with the help of U.N. soldiers if necessary to protect them.[/li][li]Work hard to demand political reforms in Africa that allow property rights and lower barriers to entrepreneurship.[/li][li]Micro loans to small business in Africa might go a long way, if property rights can be established.[/li][/ul]
Geography and colonial issues aside, we’ve done a terrible amount of damage by allowing modern technological weaponry into the region before it was culturally ready for such power. It’s EASY to be a badass when you’ve got guns, rpgs and a 4 wheel drive jeep; not so much when you’ve got spears, bows and your own two feet.
I’m NOT implying that Africans are dumber or inferior in any way here, only that the culture and tribalism so perfect to the environment, is ill-equipped to deal with the influx of such powerful weaponry. What used to take a significant raiding force of warrior caste individuals with enough free time to engage in war to accomplish can now be attained by four or five drugged up teens with automatic rifles and a jeep.
Even when we can donate to organizations that will get the $ directly to those who need it, will this ever be enough?
It just seems that no matter how much Idol Gives Back or how many Live Aid concerts there or how often Bob Geldof bitches out the rest of the developed world for not giving enough billions, there are still African countries going down the toilet.
Such a complicated question deserves complicated answers. There are obviously many factors involved and I find this thread very interesting.
I think Jared Diamond was largely correct in his views of the matter, although I am open to being convinced otherwise.
I have no experience of Africa, nor of South America. But I live about 2 miles from what we call an Indian Reserve here in Canada. When I look at the First Nations people there I am seeing the result of a disintegrated culture - a culture deliberately destroyed by the policies of the Canadian governments of the past. The government of Canada recently apologized officially to Canadian First Nations for those policies, particularly the vile residential school system.
The point I’m making is that if a native (I mean “native” in the sense of belonging to the place, not in the sense of “savage”) culture is destroyed, whether deliberately or merely casually, the effect on the people is all bad. I know little of African history beyond what I was taught as a child of the British Empire. But I know that when a people is confronted with/taken over by a “superior” culture - those people have no certainties to fall back on, no structure to support their present, no structure to build their future on, because they learn that their old ways are inferior and should be discarded. One generation of disruption is about all it takes.
I am making my point poorly, I think.
I also despair about the future for Africa. Maybe every non-African should just leave, maybe a big fence should be built, maybe a total and complete embargo on any dealings with Africa should be put in place and the gates kept locked for 200 years.
I think that to evaluate the “cultural disruption” hypothesis, one first needs an objective way to assess amount of cultural disruption. How would you propose doing so?
Well, therein lies the difficulty, of course. There is no history to go by, that I know of, no comparison to make with “pre-contact” African societies. There might well be such history, but I don’t know it.
I’m going on my knowledge of the First Nations here in BC. It is not necessary for an invader to seek to deliberately destroy the native society, it seems that often mere exposure to new ways is sufficient. If the young people become convinced or are educated to believe that their own ways are inferior and uncivilized, then the damage is quickly done. In our case, thousands of children were forcibly taken from their families, with the stated outcome being “assimilation”. Of course, racism in Canada against the First Nations people is so strong and so endemic that the poor kids had no future with the larger culture and could not function properly in their own. The old saying of “taking a good heathen and making a poor white man” is true enough.
Most European invaders were convinced that European ideas were superior to any other, and in many cases there was a deliberate intent to “civilize” Africans and turn them into imitation Brits or French. Europeans assume that property rights don’t exist unless they are the kind of property rights we enjoy - and yet tribal societies have systems of their own that work well. Would those societies, had they been left alone, have ever evolved to our *magnificent * heights?
I don’t know that we can be certain that the “best” outcome for Africa is to become like us, and I think that if that is to be the case there is a long, miserable road ahead. There is no undoing what has been done.
I can see where it might be an effect. For example, one of the generally unspoken aspects of the history of slavery was that many Africans were active participants in slavery - not as victims but as perpetrators. It was Africans who initially captured and enslaved other Africans in order to subsequently sell them to European slave traders. I can see where lingering resentment between the descendants of those Africans who enslaved Africans and those Africans whose relatives were enslaved might increase ethnic hostility.
But overall, I feel that after all these decades, the effects of slavery must have disapated to the point where they can’t explain the huge discrepancy between Africa and the rest of the Third World. Especially because the areas where slave trading was virtually non-existant seem just as bad as the areas that were most affected by slavery. So I’m not saying this theory is provably wrong but I haven’t seen the evidence that it’s right.