That is suprising to me. I lived in Tanzania for a year, and while the internet connection there was not perfect by any stretch of immagination, I had way less

That is suprising to me. I lived in Tanzania for a year, and while the internet connection there was not perfect by any stretch of immagination, I had way less ping than this (100 ms to London, where my company's servers are, 120-150 to Boston). For reference, that is: aerial to my ISP two kilometers away, then fiber to Dar Es Salaam, then Seacom to Mombassa, then Seacom again to Marseille, then terrestrial fiber to London via the channel). This smells a lot like contention on the seacom link (the big fiber optics carrier that goes up the east coast of Africa through the Suez canal and accross the mediterranean to Marseille). I would be interested to see a traceroute. Most of the times ISPs in west Africa don't buy enough upstream traffic on undersea cables, creating contention. I can't blame them, it's expensive, but it's mostly an economic argument, not because the servers are too far away (also, most ISPs run pretty agressive caches of everything under the sun).