African nations typically fall toward the bottom of any list measuring small size economic activity, such as income per capita or GDP per capita, despite a wealth of natural resources. In 2009, 22 of 24 nations identified as having "Low Human Development" on the United Nations' (UN) Human Development Index were in Sub-Saharan Africa.[1] In 2006, 34 of the 50 nations on the UN list of least developed countries are in Africa.[2] In many nations, GDP per capita is less than US$5200 per year, with the vast majority of the population living on much less. In addition, Africa's share of income has been consistently dropping over the past century by any measure. In 1820, the average European worker earned about three times what the average African did. Now, the average European earns twenty times what the average African does.[3]

Remember, there were people getting murdered for trying to quit working in Diamond mines. Feet cut off of children. Europe giving themselves 'ownership' papers for the land. For hundreds of years Africa has been a place that europeans covet and despise. They covet the land and the riches and despise the people and culture.

Africa has always been treated like a continent sized plantation by American and European colonialists. Add in China and Saudi Arabia in this century because both countries are buying huge chunks of farmland to grow food for export back to their own countries.

African resources have been stolen from the African people ever since the continent was discovered. Americans and Europeans stole the resources and then blamed the African peoples for their poverty.

The same thing that was done to Haiti by the French colonialists. The reason Haiti is so resource poor is that the timber and other natural resources were stolen by the French after the African and Indian people of Haiti dared to revolt against the French white overlords. Haiti was assessed reparations by the French as payment/bribery for the French agreeing to leave Haiti. The reparations were not fully paid off until around 1965.

When European countries "freed" them - the same way Haiti was made to pay for it's freedom from colonial rule. I don't have the sources, but a DU posts some relatively recent time back had the links about this practice.

Although many African countries are/were resource rich, those resources were looted/stolen by colonial governments. Even once the countries separated from European dominance, often their resources were still owned and exploited by European corporations. Then on top of having their wealth looted, they had to pay out what money they could accumulate to their former invaders.

No wonder many countries that were former colonies/dependencies have trouble keeping good leaders in power. They have no basis for setting up decent governments and few resources to educate and to provide services for their people.

Plus the whole situation in Africa is often used by white supremacists as "proof" that non-whites are inferior to whites.

"These people can't learn, can't work, can't rule themselves, so there is no point in teaching them, giving them jobs, letting them run their own affairs."

Then when the people have had no education, no experience, and can't get or keep a job, blame them for being ignorant and shiftless - when the people in power have created that situation.

It happens all the time, all over the world and it sucks.

no one would have believed that Native Americans could run a business. Then Clinton administration gave them a go-ahead on the casinos. Not all of them have had success but the ones in my area not only made a success of the casinos but used the profits to create other businesses. They have been educating their children to take over ever since. They were able to break that cycle because they were given a chance: the right to run their own reservation business, a loan to get started (now fully paid back) and advisors to learn how.

To my knowledge that has not been tried in the inner cities and definitely not in the poorer African countries.

Take away every opportunity and incentive and they will learn that it's not even worth it to try.

That's what pisses me off about de-funding education - children want to learn and the earlier the better. But trying to get decent funding for early education is such an uphill battle it's insane. I don't have kids, but I am happy to pay property and other taxes to educate ALL the children in our society so it will be a better place in the future. Unfortunately, the Republicans that run Florida don't agree.

times when I feel like we might just as well give in. And I realize that is what they want us to feel.

If you look at any part of the globe that is dealing with economic or social strife it can be traced back to the effects of empire and colonialism.
I've been learning too well that history is never in the past. It affects everything we have to deal with today.

Europeans only colonized bits and pieces of that continent.

and left the rest to the Africans. Same as the US gave the First Peoples of this country the "useless and unwanted" parts of this country. Until they discovered gold in the Dakotas and oil in Oklahoma. Then the US stole that back from the First Peoples. Classic colonial behavior.

Same as the Israelis only taking the parts of the West Bank that have water resources, leaving the driest areas as reservations/prisons for the Palestinians.

.... aka the pillaging of a continent and its people

but some colonial masters (i.e., Belgium) were experts at divide-and-conquer, knowing that they could perpetually inflame ethnic tensions by favoring one tribe over all the others....

Anything to start a fire so they can rob them blind while they're fighting. One day the entire contenent will get it together. I wish I could see it.

TYY

but is it greed driven from within or without.

reigns. And the greed from within is easily exploited by the outside influences.

many of the francophone countries' currency was still tied to the Franc (don't know how that works now

with the Euro) and the French corporations were still exploiting the resources of the country — taking

out raw materials back to France and many finished products, shipping them back to the African

countries for them to buy. So not only were the French still taking the resources they were doing the

double wammy by having the source countries' economies absorb and pay for products made with their

own resources.

In the hotel's I stayed in the beers were mostly French brands, so the exploitation is still going on it's

just not labelled colonialism anymore.

Last edited Wed Feb 18, 2015, 10:44 AM - Edit history (1)

the countries are all basically made up entities imposed on Africa by Europeans.

But I think there are a number of other factors:
1. The decolonialization in many cases was very, very rapid, and left a power vacuum that was scooped up by the person who could muster the most physical force.
2. Many colonial powers to the losses of their colonies badly, and basically decided to remove any chances of the colonies being successful. When the French pulled out of some of their colonies, they in some cases removed electrical wiring from government buildings, as well as large quantities of records.
3. Running a government is really hard, and many African countries had no "civil service" class in place the way many of the Asian colonies did. This left in place a not-particularly competent and corruption susceptible set of government workers.
4. Somewhat more controversially, if we compare African colonization to Latin American colonization, the Catholic Church had a stabilizing effect during the withdrawal of colonial power from Latin America. Because African colonization to place by a variety of colonial powers in a later period of history, there was no unifying religious theme to the colonization. Catholic colonization (for all of its faults) generally also carried with it a significant investment in education.

The resource to be exploited varies - in some cases it's cheap labor, in other cases it's a natural resource - but in a chaotic and screwed-up situation, there is a lot of money to be made safely and with minimal risk, so long as you check your basic humanity at the door. Unfortunately, we as a species have a seemingly irreducible percentage of greedy bastards willing to do just that. For these men (and it's almost exclusively men) they can make a lot of money via tactics that appall the rest of humanity. By accumulating this wealth, they become de facto movers and shakers, influencing systems in other countries to perpetuate the misery they find so profitable.

Such men are adept at recruiting and employing puppets in the political, military and financial systems around the world to make sure the lucrative atrocities continue, whether it's in Africa, the Middle East, or other places around the globe. They coordinate with popular media outlets (similarly co-opted) to keep the public in the dark about their nefarious activities. People who expose these machinations can look forward to public vilification in the media, capture by the puppets of the exploiters, torture, death, and even posthumous character assassination. The system is so ingrained it will not be eradicated in my lifetime, and probably not yours or your children's.

That last fact, however, doesn't mean I'm going to quit fighting against these greedy motherfuckers, and no, I don't care if that epithet hurts their feelings.

received billions of dollars from the U.S. and carte blanche to do whatever he wanted domestically. Prime example: Mobutu of Congo/Zaire.

Its a conspiracy of greedy men. In Africa and in the former colonial states, working together to make as much as they can. One of the most glaring examples is what happened in the former Congo and their first ever democratically elected President Lumumba who gave hope to his country that they would be throwing off the shackles of colonial economic rule. The US, UK and Belgium, instead of helping him, conspired to eliminate him and put in their puppet Mobutu to keep the cash flowing.

Who knows what Africa would look like today if Western countries actually helped encourage democracy instead of squashing it using covert intelligence operations. They know they can always find another greedy African to be their puppet. Greed has no color.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrice_Lumumba

Patrice Émery Lumumba (born Élias Okit'Asombo;[1][2][3] 2 July 1925 – 17 January 1961) was a Congolese independence leader and the first democratically elected Prime Minister of the Republic of the Congo (now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo). As founder and leader of the Mouvement national congolais, Lumumba helped win his country's independence from Belgium in 1960.

Within twelve weeks, Lumumba's government was deposed in a coup during the Congo Crisis. The main reason why he was ousted from power was his opposition to Belgian-backed secession of the mineral-rich Katanga province.[4] Lumumba was subsequently imprisoned by state authorities under Joseph-Desiré Mobutu and executed by firing squad under the command of the secessionist Katangan authorities. The United Nations, which he had asked to come to the Congo, did not intervene to save him. Belgium, the United States (via the CIA), and the United Kingdom (via MI6) have all been accused of involvement in Lumumba's death.[5][6][7]

Everyone else is just a scapegoat.

that other countries and corporations want, coupled with lots of different ethnic groups and undeveloped state systems.

over many of those countries are all reasons for it.

I think I read that Africa has many of the poorest countries in the world, and combine that with a huge population, with leaders who are corrupt dictators that steal money and whatever wealth there is from their countries and their people for themselves, and long standing historical tensions and feuds among different tribes and religions, well, it all makes for quite a lot of chaos and trouble.

I imagine there are some good books that talk about the subject, and the history of the continent, maybe go to Amazon and do a search?

and history of oppression.

This is a very simplified version but, if you study the history of the diamond trade in South Africa it will make you sick at heart. It's just one of the factors but it's genesis is in colonialization by the Dutch and the British. Before the diamonds were discovered in the 1860s the natives all lived in the wild in their small villages and they lived well in their chosen lifestyle. They preferred not to go to the big cities so the colonials passed laws which forced the villages to pay taxes. This led to the young men being forced to leave their villages to go find jobs in the cities and, yeah, to work in the diamond mines which didn't pay well and in which the working conditions were as bad as anyone can imagine. I remember a photograph I saw in The National Geographic decades ago of young black males deep in the bowels of the mines working in 120 degree conditions. It has always stuck with me. It was just another form of slavery. The villages were never able to recover. Eventually many of the people were forced to move to the filth and poverty of the slums in South Africa where they would get jobs as servants to the colonials.

The history of Africa is long and complex, but colonialism played a huge role in it's history and it's present circumstances.

and it's complicated... each country has a different story to tell.

They went in and stole the resources and put puppet power in the hands of greedy corrupt indigenous kings.

As opposed to settler colonialism where the goal is to steal resources and settle new territory.

Of course this wasn't the case in every African country, but it was in most.

They cited the following problems:

1. A bunch of tribes that didn't like one another were put into one country.

2. The descendants of freed slaves (the so-called Americo-Liberians) considered themselves an aristocracy and lorded it over the indigenous people in a series of corrupt dictatorships

3. American corporations moved in to take advantage of the natural resources (the missionaries lived near a plantation owned by Goodyear Rubber) and hire the local people for peanuts.

4. America aid was useless, because it either went straight into the pockets of corrupt officials or never left the States. For example, there would be an announcement of a road-building project financed with U.S. aid. The project consisted of getting outdated road building equipment (with U.S. government payments made directly to the company that manufactured the equipment, not to Liberia) shipped over, but there were not enough civil engineers trained to design a modern road, nor were there mechanics trained in the maintenance of heavy equipment. Meanwhile, there were huge numbers of unemployed young men with nothing to do but hang out in the streets.

And military aid was the worst of all, because it was either used to repress the people or some of the lighter weapons ended up in the hands of criminals.

The missionaries felt that it would be a better use of aid money to hire the unemployed men (prevailing wage at the time, 10 cents an hour) to build roads by low-tech means.

But who'd listen to someone who had actually lived among the local people for thirty years and understood how the society worked or didn't work?

Much of Africa is still in a tribal state not unlike Europe 700 years ago. Without the concept of nationalism taking hold, no government has been strong enough to force a transition from old tribal systems to modern industrial nation-states.

Few of the wealth- and stability-building concepts developed in 18th and 19th century Europe were ever adopted there, despite colonialism. Leaders like Mugabe don't help.

From Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, the premise falls on the colonial powers removing infrastructure and social mores from the regions which were enslaved for generations, drawing arbitrary lines having little to do with the local cultures, and western power handed to individuals who did not have their nation's interest as a primary motivating factor in their rule.

This was further confused by rising nationalism by urban professionals with the vast majority of the nation's voice (the rural farmer-- usually a subsistence farmer) being denied. Furthermore, with the exception of a few areas in West Africa and along the Mediterranean, coherent states with a strong sense of cultural, ethnic, and linguistic unity did not exist in most of Africa. Most traditional states, such as Ashanti in West Africa, Songhai in the southern Sahara, and Bakongo in the Congo Basin, were collections of heterogeneous peoples with little sense of national or cultural identity. Even after colonies were established, the European powers often practiced a policy of "divide and rule," while the British encouraged political decentralization by retaining the authority of the traditional native chieftains. It is hardly surprising that when opposition to colonial rule emerged, unity was difficult to achieve.

(see: Rise and Fall of the great Power, Paul Kennedy for greater info)

A big part of the problem is that most of Africa's culture does not lend itself to the nation-state dynamic imposed by the western world.

slavery ?

that imposed the national boundaries in Africa from what I've read. Rather than an organic origin to the countries.
Sorry if i didn't make that clearer.

some scholars estimate that between 11 - 15 million Africans were taken. Many more millions died as a result of purposeful wars that were instituted in an attempt to capture prisoners for,the slave trade.

Many Africans call it their own Holocaust and I agree.

That kind of devastation has indelible lasting effects.

the theft of a people. Fantastic point.

And the thought process that condemns a people to subhuman status because of coloration still continues today. But today racists generally do not claim color as a factor in their racism. Generally. Instead they use phrases like
"inherent genetic differences" or
"food stamp President" or
"welfare queens" or
"a culture of dependency" or
many other catch phrases to disguise their racism as pseudo-science

also has a lot to do with the fact that their colonial rulers took the countries resources and exported them. We are still doing that across the world.

from desert to tropical and on up.

I visited Cameroon and traveled from Yaounde the capital to a village in the coastal mountains with a climate much like San Francisco's — you had to wear a light jacket because of the cool, foggy temperatures.

It's a vast continent (second biggest next to Asia with 53 countries) with deserts, rain forest and mountain regions like every other continent on the planet.

You can't just say "look at the climate" as if it's a single country.

adequate food for all its inhabitants. I was not assuming that it is all totally wasteland. I have not had the opportunity to visit any of the countries but I have had many friends who went to college with me and we now support several young people through Compassion. One in Tanzania and one in Kenya. These two countries show the variety in their own climates. Surely "look at the climate" does not have to be limited to the whole. It can also mean look at the countries climate.

The question was about countries in Africa.

Wrecked local economies, banking, and community resources, stolen land, and leased it back out necessitating the farming of cash crops over subsistence crops.

families were able to feed their families. Then the corporations came in and took the land to raise things such as peanuts for export to other countries. The former land owners moved to the city to find jobs. Most of them did not find any. That was back prior to the 70s and I don't think anything has changed.

I'm not against GMOs for the usual hippy-dippy reasons. I don't think they are less nutritious. I DO think in the right hands they can help save lives. What I DO think is letting any one corporation exert that much control over global food supply is insanity. GMOs are grown as monocultures which necessitates an entirely different approach to agriculture, an approach that has no room for local subsistence patterns and community sharing of resources.

our hands.

This is more a topic for a book than for a post. Or at least some online research.

Considering the size of the continent there were fewer navigable waterways compared to places like Europe. Rapids and waterfalls made a lot of the rivers unnavigable.

Travel brings shared knowledge, so without travel a culture is stuck advancing on its own; Thus, many African peoples did not advance very far compared to their European counterparts.

Colonialism played a role, but the continent is absolutely gigantic, and, frankly, Europeans only colonized bits and pieces of it.

It also doesn't help that you have dictators with first-world weaponry ruling poor, uneducated third-world people.

England was small, but damp. Crops.

I have become acquainted with both white and Black Africans over the years and it seems the Europeans took African lands, building fences around them much like they did in the Americas, pushing the indigenous populations to the margins, redrawing borders into nations, leaving many of the tribes disenfranchised in the process. In many of those nations the Europeans were expelled in the last century, but it seems the harm was done, and the corruption of trying to gain and keep power is causing all the chaos.

We also tend to hear mostly about the negative.

Africa is also so big that you need to view it on a smaller scale to figure out problems and solutions.

The recent Ebola outbreak showed the ignorance of many when people from parts of Africa nowhere near the outbreak were suspected and kept out of school (in the united states)

....by examining how other continents prospered in comparison. The reason for that is guns, germs, and steel.

Guns Germs and Stell, the Fates of Human Societies.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel


The theory outlined

Diamond argues that Eurasian civilization is not so much a product of ingenuity, but of opportunity and necessity. That is, civilization is not created out of superior intelligence, but is the result of a chain of developments, each made possible by certain preconditions.

The first step towards civilization is the move from nomadic hunter-gatherer to rooted agrarian. Several conditions are necessary for this transition to occur: 1) access to high protein vegetation that endures storage; 2) a climate dry enough to allow storage; 3) access to animals docile enough for domestication and versatile enough to survive captivity. Control of crops and livestock leads to food surpluses. Surplus frees people up to specialize in activities other than sustenance and supports population growth. The combination of specialization and population growth leads to the accumulation of social and technologic innovations which build on each other. Large societies develop ruling classes and supporting bureaucracies, which in turn lead to the organization of nation states and empires.[2]

Although agriculture arose in several parts of the world, Eurasia gained an early advantage due to the greater availability of suitable plant and animal species for domestication. In particular, Eurasia has barley, two varieties of wheat and three protein-rich pulses for food; flax for textiles; goats, sheep and cattle. Eurasian grains were richer in protein, easier to sow and easier to store than American maize or tropical bananas.

As early Middle Eastern civilizations began to trade, they found additional useful animals in adjacent territories, most notably horses and donkeys for use in transport. Diamond identifies 13 species of large animals (over 100 lb / 44 kg) domesticated in Eurasia, compared with just one in South America (counting the llama and alpaca as breeds within the same species) and none at all in the rest of the world. Australia and North America suffered from a lack of useful animals due to extinction, probably by human hunting, shortly after the end of the Pleistocene, whilst the only domesticated animals in New Guinea came from the East Asian mainland during the Austronesian settlement some 4,000–5,000 years ago. Sub-Saharan biological relatives of the horse including zebras and onagers proved untameable; and although African elephants can be tamed, it is very difficult to breed them in captivity;[2][3] Diamond describes the small number of domesticated species (14 out of 148 "candidates&quot as an instance of the Anna Karenina principle: many promising species have just one of several significant difficulties that prevent domestication.

Eurasians domesticated goats and sheep for hides, clothing, and cheese; cows for milk; bullocks for tilling fields and transport; and benign animals such as pigs and chickens. Large domestic animals like horses and camels offered the considerable military and economic advantages of mobile transport.

A crucial and unintended product of animal domestication was the transmutation of viruses from livestock to humans. Smallpox, measles and influenza were the result of close proximity between dense populations of animals and humans. Through chronic exposure and centuries of intermittent, but non-decimating, epidemics, Europeans developed significant resistance to these viruses. Though malaria is often considered the most dangerous micro-organism to humans, it is geographically limited. Smallpox is geographically unlimited, and Europeans took it with them wherever they went.

Eurasia's large landmass and long east-west distance increased these advantages. Its large area provided it with more plant and animal species suitable for domestication, and allowed its people to exchange both innovations and diseases. Its East-West orientation allowed breeds domesticated in one part of the continent to be used elsewhere through similarities in climate and the cycle of seasons. The Americas had difficulty adapting crops domesticated at one latitude for use at other latitudes (and, in North America, adapting crops from one side of the Rocky Mountains to the other). Similarly, Africa was fragmented by its extreme variations in climate from North to South: crops and animals that flourished in one area never reached other areas where they could have flourished, because they could not survive the intervening environment. Europe was the ultimate beneficiary of Eurasia's East-West orientation: in the first millennium BC, the Mediterranean areas of Europe adopted the Middle East's animals, plants, and agricultural techniques; in the first millennium AD, the rest of Europe followed suit.[2][3]

The plentiful supply of food and the dense populations that it supported made division of labor possible. The rise of non-farming specialists such as craftsmen and scribes accelerated economic growth and technological progress. These economic and technological advantages eventually enabled Europeans to conquer the peoples of the other continents in recent centuries by using the "Guns" and "Steel" of the book's title.

Eurasia's dense populations, high levels of trade, and living in close proximity to livestock resulted in widespread transmission of diseases, including from animals to humans. Natural selection forced Eurasians to develop immunity to a wide range of pathogens. When Europeans made contact with America, European diseases (to which they had no immunity) ravaged the indigenous American population, rather than the other way around (the "trade" in diseases was a little more balanced in Africa and southern Asia: endemic malaria and yellow fever made these regions notorious as the "white man's grave";[4] and syphilis may have originated in the Americas).[5] The European diseases – the "Germs" of the book's title – decimated indigenous populations so that relatively small numbers of Europeans could maintain their dominance.[2][3]

Diamond also proposes geographical explanations for why western European societies, rather than other Eurasian powers such as China, have been the dominant colonizers,[2][6] claiming Europe's geography favored balkanization into smaller, closer, nation-states, bordered by natural barriers of mountains, rivers and coastline. Threats posed by immediate neighbours ensured governments that suppressed economic and technological progress soon corrected their mistakes or were out-competed relatively quickly, such as the counter-progressive Polish regime, whilst the region's leading powers changed over time. Other advanced cultures developed in areas whose geography was conducive to large, monolithic, isolated empires, without competitors that might have forced the nation to reverse mistaken policies such as China banning the building of ocean-going ships. Western Europe also benefited from a more temperate climate than Southwest Asia where intense agriculture ultimately damaged the environment, encouraged desertification, and hurt soil fertility.

for the intelligent and informative replies.

It's a sad but very interesting history if you want to read up on it. Try reading about King Leopold II of Belgium and you'll probably have a pretty good idea of how ugly colonialism was there (in addition to the slave trade.)

many countries, including ours, are screwed up in different ways. But the people in Africa suffer more from poverty and corruption than other places.

The way things are going we might all be African someday soon.

But we are talking about a group of nations which suffer from similar problems.
See post #4
As I said there are many screwed up countries, I am just not familiar with African history, so i am asking. I am not trying to make a statement like "Oh, look how bad Africa is." This is a inquiry.

In much of the world, national borders have shifted over time to reflect ethnic, linguistic, and sometimes religious divisions. Spain's borders generally enclose the Spanish-speakers of Europe; Slovenia and Croatia roughly encompass ethnic Slovenes and Croats. Thailand is exactly what its name suggests. Africa is different, its nations largely defined not by its peoples heritage but by the follies of European colonialism. But as the continent becomes more democratic and Africans assert desires for national self-determination, the African insistance on maintaining colonial-era borders is facing more popular challenges, further exposing the contradiction engineered into African society half a century ago.

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/09/the-dividing-of-a-continent-africas-separatist-problem/262171/

Africa is rich in resources, and the last thing you want as a Western European or North American commercial enterprise which depends on those resources is a self-determining local population, since to lose control over those resources raises all kind of risks. So they do what they can to subvert the development of democracy. That is a big part of why many resource-rich African states are basket cases.

1. You take a bunch of societies that are mostly tribal
2. You draw arbitrary lines on the map that divide ethnic groups and force people to live with other people they don't like
3. You use these places as sources for natural resources while making limited attempts to actually improve the human capital of the nation or build national institutions that would be required for self-rule.
4. You suddenly withdrawal leaving your wacky borders in place
5. Everything collapses into chaos and war as old ethnic grudges play out and you realize you didn't actually create the kind of institutions or provide the kind of education that people need to run these suddenly modern countries placed in their lap.

Recipe for chaos. It is slowly getting better thankfully.

Large parts of Africa are simply not well suited for centralized nation states. Places like the Congo are full of thick jungles that make them hard to rule and very easy for separatists or criminals to hide out in. You see a very different story in places like Mali or Ethiopia which had great empires.

Others have brought up that colonial-era borders don't really reflect the natural cultural/ethnic/linguistic groupings in much of Africa.

As for corruption, I can't speak for all of Africa, but most of W Africa is shockingly corrupt all the way up and down the socioeconomic scale (with the political/military/economic elite being the greatest thieves, naturally) Even countries that have a lot going for them, like Nigeria are hamstrung by the fact that it is incredibly hard to apply resources to things like infrastructure or social programs without it being siphoned off by everybody attached to the project. The high level of corruption also allows a lot of the wealth that should be brought into the countries through resource extraction and industry is stolen before it even makes it into Africa in the first place.

I think climate and terrain play a part too. Much of Africa is either desert, arid grassland or jungle, and not really suitable for the settlement patterns throughout the temperate regions of Eurasia and the Americas. So instead of a network of towns and cities that benefit mutually from trade and other economic activity, you end up with a few huge regional cites separated by hundreds of miles of rural hinterland that practices subsistence agriculture or a nomadic lifestyle.

I am asking for informed analysis, not trying to make a point.

As opposed to Settler Colonialism as was practiced in the Americas.

It's deep in the culture. Hard to root out.

Village collegiality = someone who makes it owes the village a living.

Add to that it's very difficult to educate children disseminated in low density villages.

Colonialism brought good and bad in equal measures.

Africa was behind the rest of the world in economic/cultural development in the XVIIIth century.

Slavery had been a fact of life at the hands of Africans, Arabs and, later, Westerners.

On the + side, Colonialism brought transport infrastructure, schooling, hospitals.

On the - side, Colonial powers repaid themselves in raw materials and cheap labor.

But even independence leaders like Senghor were not blaming Africa's ills on colonialism.

than many here.

while completely omitting the cost in blood and human lives...

That's a big part of it, in addition to what bravenak and others have said upthread.

Do bears $#*! in the woods?



As in the Middle East, the national boundaries were drawn with absolute disregard for ethnic groups, etc.

The societies just don't have the infrastructure to accommodate that population shift and all the issues that come with it.

The issue that is more nuanced is why people are heading for the cities and that depends on the region.

The secondary problem is the ongoing brain drain of the African professional class that began in the 1950's and just can't be stopped. The people who had the ability for the state building that had to occur after the end of colonialism left on the same plane. Each subsequent generation does the same either becoming disillusioned or merely seeking better opportunities. This allows for the domination of kleptocrats, incompetents and ideologues.

It is hard to build modern societies when the best and brightest leave and millions of unskilled peasants are congregating in slums.

From this query? And only want to consider Sub-Saharan Africa?

the countries of North Africa had a different history and culture. Places like Egypt or Morocco seem different to me from the Sub-Sahara countries. More heavily Muslim, different type of colonization. Maybe I'm making a distinction that shouldn't be there. I acknowledge i am asking out of ignorance.
Any comments and opinions are welcome

Do you think the problems of Somalia, Malawi or the Congo are similar to those of Libya and Algiers?

What ignorance due you purport to have?

what I DON'T know?

is naive.

Many underlying issues have been posited as to why Africa (save Egypt and parts of North Africa) did not develop along the same lines as Europe, parts of Asia and, to a certain extent, the Americas.

Colonialism is certainly one of them but certainly not the only one.

This article posits a geographic cause

Don't forget that the Romans did a real number on their North African counterpart of Carthage wiping them off the map.

The lack of (for the most part) the development of written language and reliance on a oral tradition impacted the ability of cross generational knowledge transfer.

Then, of course, there is impact of climate change over the millennia.

Colonialism rears its head when the more technologically advanced civilizations met the less technologically advanced civilizations.

"Guns, Germs, and Steel" by Jared Diamond goes far deeper than an internet posting can possibly go.

And countries trying to bring about the END TIMES. They need to start a Holy War.

for many of the same reasons that this country is so screwed up.