re: Honest thoughts on Black Independence

We had a 50% Kenyan President ...isn't that good enough?

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Why try to develop a better mining or agricultural process when can just sell X number of defeated tribes for some quick gold.

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Well they weren't smart enough to figure those things out in the first place

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volod Post

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had a 50% Kenyan President ...isn't that good enough?

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This about America. It's about the state of the African continent. Sad part is that I know alot of pretty smart individuals who came from those poor countries.

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Well they weren't smart enough to figure those things out in the first place

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That's by and large not true, if we are talking about Africa as a distinct continent. Metallurgy and mining was developed in Egypt around 5000 BCE, and was practiced all up and down the Nile River Valley. By 1000 BCE, most regions in Africa had some form of mining. Alluvial, open, and underground mining were practiced as well. Smelting was also practiced. Some African civilizations cast copper and gold using the Lost-wax casting method, which is pretty much ubiquitous in antiquity. The notion that African civilizations weren't smart enough to figure out how to mine or grow crops is not based in reality. It's a colonial justification that is repeated so often despite the fact that Africans did have most of the features of other civilizations, from agriculture to religion to mining, but our archaeological record isn't as robust, for numerous reasons. Despite this, the evidence we do have suggests that African civilizations did not enter the Iron Age all that much later than other civilizations. Indeed, ancient Nubia was an major manufacturer and exporter of iron.

I could delve into this further, but it's an incredibly complex continent with an incredibly varied history. To write them off as "not smart enough" is not based in the facts that we actually have.

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Those people were barely allowed to read less that a hundred years ago. Think about that. They were put way at the back as far as learning goes. Luckily that has changed and things are bigly bettter.

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this

200 years ago they had to ride on the back of the bus


now theyre the only ones that ride the bus

Go back to the age of European colonialism. Regarding, technological advancement, Africa was on a maybe similar level with New World Americans. Aztec, Maya, Inca, etc. You see what became of those cultures. I don’t think it has anything to do with being black or being American Indian or any other color or culture. Point is they all fell behind and they all got trampled. There have been instances where some “inferior” cultures caught up but I think that’s the exception.

I saw a very successful black nation in Black Panther

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I think this thread is meant to address why sub Saharan Africa hasn’t developed relative to the West in the past few hundred years.

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Well we are talking about a massive region. The Sahara itself is a region larger than the United States as a landmass. If we remove that region, we are still talking about 22 million square kilometers.

It's also an incredibly diverse landmass. In general, the major reason why Sub-Saharan Africa hasn't developed is that their elite class is supremely predatory, which makes NGO development efforts mostly fruitless, as it becomes a way of siphoning cash away from developmental projects into the pockets of well-positioned people. That elite also has contributed to general political instability, which also allows for foreign powers to continue to dictate politics to those countries. In comparison to Asia, which had a series of colonial and post-colonial wars that generally ended by the 70's, Africa still sees decades old conflicts, which also reduce developmental efforts. Sudan, Ethiopia, Congo, Angola, South Africa, Somalia, Eritrea, Rwanda and others all have had major conflicts well past their battles for independence, and nothing hurts a countries development like civil conflict.

The brain drain argument is less convincing for me. Countries like China and India have suffered a greater amount of brain drain, yet both have grown at healthy rates since 1990, at which point both countries can be considered "liberalized" in terms of their economics. The most obvious reason for depressed gross domestic product is civil conflict, either foreign or domestic. Let's look at Zimbabwe. After the country succeeded Rhodesia, it actually saw immediate growth, nearly doubling in size from 5 billion in GDP to 8 billion in GDP. The countries economy took a turn for the worst once they became involved in the Second Congo War, which coincided with land-reform, drought, and a drop in external investment, at which point Zimbabwe becomes a meme of what not to do within a postcolonial context.

In addition, there isn't a blanket answer for all of the continent. You have situations like Equatorial Guinea, in which the predatory elite keep the population in poverty, but show good growth indicators (including the highest GDP per capita on the continent) and others like Botswana, which has good growth rates, protection for minorities, low levels of crime, high rates of development, but a terrible AIDS crisis which affects nearly a quarter of their population, and subsequently diverts resources to their care that would otherwise be available for other things.

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10 pages

4 bans

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I'll take over on both