Why does Africa suffer?

Great Debates
81

[QUOTE=silenus]
If that is true, then any and all attempts to change conditions are doomed to failure, so why bother? Save trillions of dollars worldwide and untold billions of man-hours of effort. Is that the answer? I don’t think so.
[/QUOTE]

This is the crux of the matter, isn’t it?

We have undertaken to “fix” it. Is that the right course? It isn’t possible for all of “us” to withdraw and leave Africa to it.

I don’t see that we have much choice but to try to “fix” it, for a variety of reasons. Two of those reasons are guilt and compassion.
Efforts at creating self-sufficiency seem wisest. You know, “give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach a man to fish and you feed him for life”. But these approaches all assume that we know best, and that we are right in making the attempt.

I’m not so sure. But I’m not sure of the opposite, either. I don’t think African nations are ever going to be like Canada or Germany or the US.

82

[QUOTE=holmes]
What they are desperate to hear is that Africans are defective; that they are created defective; born that way.
[/quote]

I’m not sure that “defective” is a good word to use in this discussion, since it implies that there is some normative standard out there.

Anyway, while I agree that there are people who want to hear that sub-Saharan Africa has problems due to the nature of its inhabitants, I think there are also people who are desperate to hear that talents and abilities are distributed evenly throughout humanity.

I think that getting an honest answer to the question requires putting aside our wishes and hopes (and prejudices) and looking at the truth, even if that truth is offsensive.

83

I started another thread in GQ.

84

[QUOTE=brazil84]
Even without such knowledge, it seems possible, in theory, to assess cultural disruption.

For example, tomndebb proposed looking, among other things, at language and religion. By this standard, the Philippines has suffered a tremendous amount of cultural disruption.

In theory, one could assess the amount of “cultural disruption” for various post-colonial areas to see if sub-Saharan Africa suffered significantly more “cultural disruption” than places like the Philippines. If not, then the “cultural disruption” hypothesis should arguably be discarded.
[/QUOTE]
No. I pointed out that changes to language and religion could be potential examples of cultural disruption.

From that perspective, the Philippines have suffered significant disruption. (They also suffered the disruption similar to that of sub-Sahara Africa (and the Middle East) of having multiple populations artificially joined.) On the other hand, the disruption in the Philippines occurred several hundred years ago, so there has been a certtain amount of time to recover from that disruption (although the disruption also continued on a limited scale through the 20th century).

If we look at a list of countries ranked by per capita GDP, we find the Philippines ranked ahead of most of Africa, but well toward the bottom of the list of nations that preced the African nations.

(Similarly, India, which was able to hang onto its language and religion, still suffered disruptions to marriage practices, the elimination of the caste system (first in law and then in local custom), and the forced association of diverse populations. India’s per capita GDP is, in fact, fairly close to that of the Philippines. As opposed to Algeria, which did not suffer exactly the same traumas and which is ranked among the “poor” European nations.)

Note, also, that I have made no claim that there is a direct correspondence between any nation’s current success and previous colonial history. Many factors can cause a nation like Zimbabwe or Myanmar/Burma or Cambodia to go into a tailspin. My point was that there is a close correspondence between the types of colonizations that occurred in regions and the current economic status of such regions and that that would seem to be a more fruitful explanation to pursue that haring off after claims that intelligence varies when we have not even established that we can accurately define or measure intelligence.

Sam Stone might be correct regarding the proximate causes of Africa’s current conditions. But those causes did not arise in a vacuum. When asking why Africa suffers, simply declaring that they have bad economic systems does not explain why they have those economic systems.

85

[QUOTE=Lust4Life]
I’m not going to get too invoved in this BUT…
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You probably should have simply stopped, there, although the amount of misinformation in the rest of your post provides an opportunity to correct it.

[QUOTE=Lust4Life]
We have had the expected "Oh its all Whiteys fault because of Slavery "chestnut.
Sorry but enslaving Black Africans is a Black African tradition .
The Europeans adopted it for a while and then discarded it on moral reasons.
Black Africans are still enslaving other Black Africans even today,in Mauretania and west Africa generally and in east Africa where they tend to sell the ones that they do not need for their own uses to Saudi Arabians.
[/quote]
As noted, the “Whitey” comment was a joke, but the rest of your statements simply display ignorance.
Yes, Africa had slavery before the coming of the Europeans and Arabs, (just as the Europeans and Arabs practiced slavery on their own kind right up until the period when they decided to substitute captured Africans for their closer neighbors). The issue of slavery in Africa was not that it existed, but the particular form it took. Slavery throughout the world has typically (not always) been the result of people being enslaved for debt or being enslaved as a byproduct of an existing war or being born into it. However, there has usually been the opportunity for such slaves to buy their freedom or to advance in social status within their slavery. (That continues to be true of much slavery practiced in Africa, today, particularly among household servants.) The introduction of the European/Arab mode of slavery changed that. Slaves became a primary commodity rather than a byproduct of poverty or warfare. Rather than some random war creating a situation of captive peoples that were then enslaved, we see a situation where constant low-grade warfare was begun for the sole purpose of depopulating other regions to take slaves. This is not a matter of “Whitey’s” depredations, because Africans were clearly involved in most aspects of the slave trade. However, over ten million Africans were simply removed from the continent–and their societies suffered corresponding disruption–in ways that did not occur in Europe or Asia. There is no question that slavery exists in Africa, today, whether it is a poor family acting as perpetual personal servants to a rich family (and considering that to be the accepted way of life) or the selling of children to sweatshops or other forced labor, or the actions by armed bands of warring factions to use forced labor to provide them food and heavy lifting. However, none of the various forms of slavery, today, come close to having the same impact on any region in Africa as the trans-Atlantic and trans-Saharan slave trades had.

[QUOTE=Lust4Life]
So lets cut the crap about just about ALL the sub Saharan nations being corrupt ,violent basket cases because of the nasty white people.
They have had more then long enough as independant nations to start taking responsibility for their own actiions.
[/quote]
Really? It seems to have taken England over a thousand years to move from tribal cultures to a nation based on democratic principles (and that included a direct effort in the eleventh and twelfth centuries to unify the country under a single government). Similar time frames can be seen in most of the rest of Europe. It’s nice that you figure that they have had “enough” time, but I see no reason to believe that you have anything on which to base that conclusion. (This is particularly true, given the amount of interference the African nations have suffered from outside sources in the period since most of the colonial powers pulled out.)

[QUOTE=Lust4Life]
We in the West have literally given Africa Trillions of dollars ,yes I did say Trillions,and they are still living in the Iron Age,still at the stage that England was at when julius Caeser invaded.

After WW2 Europe east and west was pretty much devestated ,thanks to the yanks with the Marshall aid plan and our own hard work we got our selves up and running again as amongst the most developed societies on Earth within a very few years.
[/quote]
At the end of WWII, the European nations continued to have an existing system of highways, railroads, and phone lines (even those “destroyed” were only damaged in key locations that could be rebuilt). They had populations with literacy rates exceeding 80% (and often nearing 100%). They had newspapers and radios that continued to operate and disseminate information to the overall populations. They had water systems and sewer systems. And they had suffered direct disruptrion of their lives for a matter of five and a half years, not generations. (Europe also included nations that had not been physically damaged, (Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, Sweden, Ireland) or that had suffered damage that left most of their infrastructure and manufacturing intact (UK, Denmark, perhaps Norway).)

[QUOTE=Lust4Life]
Africa ?

Dont make me laugh.
[/QUOTE]
Laughing is the last thing you should be doing.

86

[QUOTE=NineToTheSky]
(I’m the OP). Thanks for all your responses - its been very interesting reading.

(my bolding)

Really? The situation in the USA north of the Rio Grande (I’m assuming we’re talking about the south, not Colorado) is as bad as Africa? I’d like to know more about that.
[/QUOTE]

Sorry, I was deliberately excluding Central America from North America as they do no have a reservation system for the aboriginal tribes that I’m aware of.

87

[QUOTE=vison]
…

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.
[/QUOTE]

Please define “non-African”.

88

[QUOTE=silenus]
If that is true, then any and all attempts to change conditions are doomed to failure, so why bother? Save trillions of dollars worldwide and untold billions of man-hours of effort. Is that the answer? I don’t think so.
[/QUOTE]

You misunderstand me.

There is a difference in trying to work within the limitations of technology, and the culture of 1,000, 500 or even 50 years ago and now.

Part of the disappearance of the Indians was due to a lack of resistance to disease, namely small pox. The reason why the Europeans had resistance, wasn’t because they planed on it. It wasn’t because they decided to go into South American and commit germ warfare. They didn’t know, but the lack of knowledge benefited them. It was the luck of the draw.

Milkmaids got cowpox which immuned them to small pox and allowed the Europeans various degrees of immunity to it. That was random, that was fate; it was cultural, based on how they dealt with livestock. They didn’t have a superior intellect and decided to immune themselves to it. They got sick, got better and continued on, killing millions of people in their wake.

South America and Africa couldn’t do that. Their geography and culture didn’t allow for it. Does that make them less than the Europeans, who lucked into livestock, who lived with their livestock in ways that most of us today would go…ugh? I don’t believe so.

However today, we can vacinate the South Americans and Africans against small pox. We can neutralize fate, we can even to a certain extent transform geography. The question is, do we have will? To we have the stomach to understand it will take a century to do it?

Does it require that the Africans take control of their destiny? Yes, but ignoring that a great deal of their destiny was pre-ordinated and beyong their control.

To ignore that any group of people, despite their success in a different geography, with different cultures; would have suffered the same fate if they were in Africa in same conditions as the Africans, is to me the height of ignorance.

89

[QUOTE=NineToTheSky]
Why is it in their interests?
[/QUOTE]

Because they’re easier to subjugate when they’re ignorant, lacking resources and distracted by hatred of others. They’re also easier to please with when their leadership wants to look benevolent.

90

One mistake people make is to imagine that there is some sort of teleology of technological progress, like in the various Civilization games. You start in the stone age, move to the bronze age, move to the iron age, move to the middle ages, move to the renaissance. Then you have an industrial revolution, and finally end up in the modern age.

And every society starts at 4000 BC and moves along the path equally. So if one part of the world is doing really poorly, it must be the fault of the player of that society. Something wrong with their culture, something wrong with the people.

But it seems to me that history doesn’t work that way. We’re imposing our modern ideas of planned technological innovation onto the past. But up until the industrial revolution the entire idea of technological innovation didn’t exist. Yes, there was such a thing as technological innovation, but it mostly happened on a scale too slow for individual humans to notice. And it didn’t happen because some king sat down with his wise men and told them to get to work on a better method of transporting grain.

The point of all this is that it’s a mistake to imagine that Europe, China, and Africa all started at the same place 1000 years ago, and then blame Africa for not resembling modern Europe in 2008. Africa doesn’t have the same history as Europe because it hasn’t had the same history as Europe. It’s not like Europeans have always been the most technologically advanced people in the world, in fact, Europe was technologically behind China and India and the Ottoman empire up until very recently, the 1700s. Remember the “riches of the orient”? Which consisted of things like CLOTH. And pepper. And the biggest problem for traders was figuring out things that the wealthy easterners would take in payment, because trade was out of the question, since there was nothing that Europe produced that easterners wanted. Until the waves of gold and silver from the Americas solved that problem.

It just annoys me to see people wondering why the problems of Africa can’t be solved in a couple of years because it requires those same people to forget that it took Europe hundreds of years of warfare and culture clashes to get where it is today. The borders of Europe only seem rational because they’ve been fought over for hundreds of years, and there have been extensive efforts at cultural homogenization within those borders, including state religions, state sponsored language standardization, and shipping undesireable people overseas. Not to mention those wacky Nazis and the wacky Communists and such.

91

[QUOTE=tomndebb]
No. I pointed out that changes to language and religion could be potential examples of cultural disruption.
[/quote]

Then I misunderstood you. I am looking for a way of assessing “cultural disruption” which is sufficiently clear so that reasonable people could roughly agree on which places have suffered more or less.

Without such a method, the hypothesis is pretty much meaningless.

Your claim seems to be that the “cultural disruption” explanation “fits the facts.” The way to test this hypothesis is to first come up with a reasonably clear way of assessing “cultural disruption.” Then, to look at specific areas (outside of Africa) which have suffered lots of “cultural disruption” and see if they are basket cases like most areas of sub-Saharan Africa. If they aren’t, then the hypothesis arguably should be rejected.

Well, if your hypothesis applies to general regions, and not specific areas in those regions, then it doesn’t really “fit the facts” all that well. Why should the type of colonization which took place in Laos or Indonesia have a big impact on whether the Philippines ended up a basket case?

92

I’m interested in seeing those choosing a “tribalism” hypothesis define the term. So far as I can tell, a “tribe” is a group of people, defined by ethnicity, in an un-developed country. That, with regards to this discussion, is circular. I’d like to know what makes Hutu and Yaqui people examples of tribalism and Frisian and Cantonese people not.

93

[QUOTE=Lama Pacos]
I’m interested in seeing those choosing a “tribalism” hypothesis define the term. So far as I can tell, a “tribe” is a group of people, defined by ethnicity, in an un-developed country. That, with regards to this discussion, is circular. I’d like to know what makes Hutu and Yaqui people examples of tribalism and Frisian and Cantonese people not.
[/QUOTE]

I’ll bite.

Tribalism is the practice of putting your loyalty to your nearest defined ethnic group before your nation .

(To the best of my knowledge, I’m of the Batavii tribe, but if push comes to shove, I’'ll side with Canada against the Batavii and the Frisians.

94

[QUOTE=Mellivora capensis]
Please define “non-African”.
[/QUOTE]

Sorry, I wasn’t ignoring this, I just read over the thread and found it.

By “non-African”? I don’t mean “non-Black African”. I know there are white Africans, Africans of South Asian descent. I regard them as “real Africans”.

95

But why in the world would we expect a member of the Fulani ethnic group to be more loyal to Benin or Cameroon or Ghana than they are to the Fulani ethnic group? If you’re a Fulani, what has the government of Benin ever done for you?

It is foolish to expect people to be loyal to a goverment that they didn’t choose and have no say in. Of course, Europe just a few years ago had plenty of such governments. And when Serbs and Czechs and Croats weren’t more loyal to the Austro-Hungarian Empire than they were to Serbia, Czechoslovakia, or Croatia, was that a problem? Europe still has several of these states…Belgium and Switzerland for instance, but they deal with the problem of being a multiethnic state by devolving lots of decisions down to the local level.

Everyone knows that the states of Africa are largely arbitrary adminstrative units that don’t follow ethnic or geographic boundaries. And since most of these states are various sorts of authoritarian, they have no interest in federalism since that just means giving regional figures a base from which to attack you.

In Europe the problem was eventually solved by a series of wars where empires broke apart, or unified, or by the spread of liberal democracy which allowed multiethnic states to either break apart peacefully or become federal states.

And so if we want to see Africans showing more loyalty to their state than to their tribal/ethnic group, either we need to encourage the breakup of the existing administrative states and the formation of mostly ethnically homogenous nation states, or somehow encourage liberal democratic values such that people of various ethnicities don’t care what state they live in because their lives and property are secure, in the same way that francophone Belgians aren’t worried that they aren’t part of France and dutch speaking Belgians aren’t worried that they aren’t part of the Netherlands.

But that’s a chicken and egg problem, because how can you form a liberal democracy when people have no loyalty to the state they happen to live in? And why should people be loyalty to the state they happen to live in if that state isn’t a liberal democratic state? People will be loyal to a nation state that isn’t a liberal democratic state, because that’s simply another form of tribalism…they are loyal to their tribe, and their tribe is the state. Why should we expect Fulani people to be loyal to Ghana? What’s Ghana ever done for them? If they were getting aqueducts, roads, public order, and so on, it would be understandable. But most African governments don’t provide such things to their citizens, the citizens are a resource to be exploited by the rulers rather than a constituency that the leaders are accountable to. And the African leaders that ARE accountable to a constituency are those very same tribal leaders that we’re busy denoucing!

96

Re: Tribalism.
Even in long-established states 9like kenya), tribalism prevents efficient operation of the nation-state. The tribe in power diverst resources to its home area-breeding resentment in the out-of-luck powers.

97

[QUOTE=vison]
Sorry, I wasn’t ignoring this, I just read over the thread and found it.

By “non-African”? I don’t mean “non-Black African”. I know there are white Africans, Africans of South Asian descent. I regard them as “real Africans”.
[/QUOTE]

Well hell, you’re no fun. I had my white soapbox all newly painted and polished.

:stuck_out_tongue:

98

Excellent post, Lemur866.

Having just watched Spain win the Euro cup, I can say I think there is still plenty of “tribalism” in Europe. There was the King of Spain, sitting in the stands cheering the team on. There was the German chancellor, doing the same for the German team. Thousands upon thousands of fans wearing their tribal colours and swooning with delight over the plays.

Tribalism can be diverted to sporting events, but not until there is security and confidence in the nation state. As has been pointed out many times in this thread, that isn’t the case in Africa.

99

[QUOTE=Lemur866]
And when Serbs and Czechs and Croats weren’t more loyal to the Austro-Hungarian Empire than they were to Serbia, Czechoslovakia, or Croatia, was that a problem?
[/QUOTE]

Is this a rhetorical question?

100

Yeah it was. The point is that diagnosing the problem as “tribalism” doesn’t suggest any sort of solution besides the sorts of unfortunate incidents that you referenced.

The solution for European tribalism was WWI and WWII and the widescale destruction of existing states, sometimes literally through bombing those states flat, and the creation of new states. And after that, a continent-wide realization that war is bad, m’kay? And even then various people on various sides of various curtains of various materials didn’t get the memo.