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I have to ask then, Why is Africa in SUCH poverty. Compared to the rest of the world, Africa as a continent is third world. Why the hell has it never been bet
by spoiledtechie 16y ago
I have to ask then, Why is Africa in SUCH poverty. Compared to the rest of the world, Africa as a continent is third world. Why the hell has it never been better than what it was when kings and queens had control of Africa. Did it have a brain drain when the slaves were exported?
- tokenadult 16y agoThomas Sowell actually has an answer to that question. Africa's pattern of navigable rivers is much different from Europe's. In fact, Africa hardly has navigable rivers that reach the sea without going over waterfalls. The barriers to internal transportation in Africa inherently limited the development of trade routes, which limited much of the rest of the development of "civilization" as it was known in the Near East and Europe (or, for that matter, in China). Different geography led to different cultural developments. African people are plenty smart, but they don't have the same environment for building large trade networks that Europeans had at a much earlier period of history.
- pizza 16y agoPlus, 0 (yeah zero) of the 50 domesticatable candidate large animals were ever domesticated. As well as very few storable domesticated plants. Read Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel
- najirama 16y agoWait, what...? Are you suggesting that the wealth and GDP of a continent are positively correlated with its area? How bizarre... I guess somebody forgot to tell Antarctica.
- ootachi 16y agoYes, the legacies of colonialism (of which slavery was just one) have been huge. Coupled with the AIDS epidemic, which has had an impact that's nearly impossible to overstate, they've economically devastated sub-Saharan Africa.