Why is Africa so backwards still?

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In regards to Europe, we do know at the very least that it was affected by several Ice Ages. =/ -is studying anthropology-

I don't really know much about the geostrata of Africa though. =/ I guess I could ask one or two of my teachers, but we don't really have any specialized Africanists that I know of in my department regarding archeology... At most we have an ethnologue, but he studies songs (among other things) and how they tie in with political power in Congo. That said, he's a pretty cool dude, bordering on being a hipster. :p

Maybe it is just the dry and hot climate surrounded by wild animals. Sounds like an arbitrary variable? well, if something as arbitrary as skin color can be used to 'explain' this, then I am sure climate can too.

It is predictable that you, as an a-hole racist, would feel that way.

Innocent question: Why is it that more excuses are made per capita for dark skinned folks than for any other grouping of human beings? How come?

ruveyn

Rationalisation, psychological* defense mechanism.

I'd say other as I didn't think any of the options were specifically correct. I think the biggest factor was the climate and geography where their cultures initially came into being. When you have abundance in terms of food supply, warm temperatures all year round, etc., your needs for innovation aren't as strong. I tend to think that for the agricultural revolution, the movement to cities, the typical path that western civilization flowed along, the environment needs to coax innovation out of the population more often than not.

On colonialism I think it had a dual effect - it showed governance and western thinking and methods but, it was a corrupted version of it. Resources were taken as well which hurt many African nations' possibilities of being big mining countries. I think South America is doing better mainly because the Europeans brought more infrastructure there than they did to Africa.

My estimate on the future though - since Africa has so little infrastructure, when our technologies actually have a replacement for our current energy grids and transportation I believe Africa will be the hot bed for testing. Africa may very well skip the coal and oil step and go right to solar with less to replace or less reconfiguring to sort out. I do believe the 21st century will be an interesting one and we'll likely see as much if not more of a difference within the nations of Africa between 2000 and 2050 than we did with Mexico between 1960 and now. Already you do have a lot of very high tech glass cities in Africa but they're a bit island and, not unlike China, you can drive passed all the new development to find people pretty much living in huts - I'm not sure how much of that is cultural conservatism vs. opportunity but as their kids want I Phones and as many African countries become the new place to invest your money and make millions I have a feeling that other people's money will start making this happen. No doubt that desert countries on the interior like Chad won't do quite as well as the port countries like Kenya, like Senegal, like Nigeria, but then again you technically already see that right now.

In the tropics the main enemy of every living organism is other living organisms- predators, competitors, and parasites.

In the temperate zone the main enemy of every living thing is the coming of winter.

Humans can neither fly south nor hibernate so ancient human cultures in the temperate zone placed a premium on preducing a surplus to survive the winter.

Not only does the tropical rainforest not require the production of a surplace- it punishes you for trying to produce a surplus. Not only do the bugs eat everything you try to store but you cant use plows on the soil of a true rainforest because its soil turns to rock. You have to use slash and burn farming to let the land recover which forces the farmer to be seminomadic.

Most of the food crop staples of modern Africa were introduced only a few centuries ago from South East Asia, or even more recently from Tropical America (rice, bananas, cassavas,plantains etc).

The slave trade took its toll.

Colonialsim was a dbuble edged sword -taking and giving.

The end of European colonialism had the same result that the fall of Rome had on Western Europe- a descent into tribal warfare.

Africa is at the stage that Europe was at when the Visigoths, Huns,and the Vandals fought among the ruins of the aqueducts.

While Islam and Byzantium thrived it took transalpine Europe the three centuries from the fall of the last Roman Emperor in 476 to the coronation of Charlemagne in AD 800 to form its first viable states.

In modern Africa is only about fifty years since the fall of the French and British empires- so its not surprising that Africa is still at the visigoths vs Vandals stage.

Because people are only offended by negative stereotypes when there may be some truth to them, so they'll do their utmost to try and debunk them anyway. I think there's a term for that in the psychological field, but it slipped my mind.

I know! It's even the most sensible thing I've read in the whole thread.

I think this is close to an answer. Because Africans living within 30degrees of the equator do not experience seasons they never had to deal with winter where nothing grows. So they never had to master agriculture because things grow all year. This idea of progress for the rest of the world started with the agricultural revolution which supposedly began 10,000 years ago.

I think that Africa might be an economically growing country. Read a little bit more about that today. Some of the countries there are enjoying the benefits of a growing Asia - selling commodities in particular to China but also to the west also. The article is largely about fighting AIDS in Africa, but has a mention about the economy at the end.

"George Bush's Africa AIDS Achievement Big But Ignored"

http://news.investors.com/Article/afric ... nition.htm

But also I get the opinion that part of Africa's problem with failed states comes from it many ethnic groups fighting against each other. I know that colonialism is often demonized, and no doubt it had its faults and I'm guessing Africans are happy to rule themselves today without outside influences, but at the same time recall reading a book by well known historian Niall Ferguson about how Africans were economically wealthier during colonial times. The reason for this, sighted in the book, was largely due to military defense provided by the Europeans.

Arguably the least developed state in the world is the Democratic Republic of Congo. Read yesterday about the many ethnic groups there fight against each other, how the area would probably be better off if it was split apart, and the problems that colonialism caused there.

"A Non-Election In A Non-Country"

http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/ ... n-country/

Africa is a continent, not a country like Australia.

Why do so many people keep saying the climate? Look at lowland Mesoamerica, home of the Olmecs and the Maya, Cambodia, home of the great Khmer Empire, the southern Desi Subcontinent, with the Cholas, or even Southern China. All tropical rainforests. And besides, do not forget about the great civilizations of Guinea: Ife, Asanteman, Nri and the Nok are only the most successful of all. Writing was even developed independently in the form of Nsibidi in southeastern Nigeria, something that has only happened without debate in Mesoamerica, China and the Middle East... and notably NOT in Europe, by the Egham people and was soon adopted by the mainly Igbo-speaking Nri elective monarchy as the official script.

Also note that Tanzania is arguably the earliest iron-producing place on Earth, along with northern India: See the following link for a scholarly paper's abstract: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/201/4 ... 5.abstract . And in the Late Middle Ages, possibly the only hand infantry capable of competing with the samurai were the legions of Benin, armed with incredibly sharp swords, whose blades were often smeared with poison to make an almost certainly lethal blow.

Of course, we cannot forget the splendid Mali Empire, an example of cultural fusion between the Islamic world and the indigenous Mande peoples. Have a look at the huge corpus of manuscripts from Tumbutu: http://www.timbuktufoundation.org/manuscripts.html . Further, the Mali Empire may have had contact with the Indigenous Amazonians over a century before Christopher Columbus: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abubakari_II . Of course, it is hard to know and they obviously did not follow up on it, but it shows the Malians were capable of building a blue water navy. Finally, have a look at the ancient and superb center of learning that was, and still is today, Sankore Madrasah: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sankore_Madrasah .

So, as we see, Africa's climate, which of course is not all tropical rainforests, did in fact not prevent it from being one of only 4 confirmed birthplaces of writing, building vast empires and well-developed states with intricate bureaucracies.

Bang-on the money.

We're admittedly missing a lot of written history from these regions. We might find a different story for many areas but, like Carthage, I get the impression that most of these great and intellectual kingdoms through Africa were maritime based, it seemed like almost anyone with advanced society had that. Even today when you look at Asia, being landlocked is pretty close to being an obscurity warrant, one exception being Russia, until you see that the majority of its development is wrapped around the Baltic and Black seas.

As far as the Incas, Aztecs, and Nazca, they are interesting exceptions, and are as interesting in the way of exception as the North American natives being very hunter/gatherer even if somewhat mercantile. I can perhaps point out that many of the South and Central American natives lived in mountainous regions, with population explosion and perhaps being more bottled in they saw a similar effect to what Japan had with being in a very rocky/craggy region where they needed to optimize the resources they had available to them. If I remember correctly large parts of Mexico are desert, as well as southern Bolivia, you have dense jungles with stuff that's nastier to coexist with (even if more beautiful for National Geographic centerfolds) than North America's forests and swamps. It could be any of these, it could be other factors; who knows - if there is evidence that Mali influenced them I suppose we can't rule that out (and perhaps some did flee as another empire crushed theirs).

The argument of environment though is that the biome you live in changes the stresses of day to day living, what is salient and what isn't. Those stresses aren't quite felt the same way now in most places in the west because sustenance isn't the kind of priority to us that it was to earlier peoples. From that standpoint innovation started from regionally esoteric food/water/shelter needs and worked its way outward from there. More often it seems you will find animistic hunter gatherer type groups, even today, in tropical areas and it stands to reason that the lack of stresses would have been the determining factor. Much like you have some of the most nasty and brutal martial arts pouring out of places like the Philippines, Indonesia, and Southern China; especially with the Philippines this was an area where people lived for thousands of years fighting each other for their islands and the strongest/most able survived.

Necessity remains the mother of innovation it seems.

innocent question: Why does ruveyn ask loaded questions with assumptions pulled out of his a*s all the time?

As a counterpoint, China is historically a continental civilization, in spite of its vast ability to expand in maritime areas. And let us not forget isolationist Egypt and its basically land-based empire.

As for the Inka, which I have studied a great deal about, along with other, pre-Inka Andean Civilizations, true, they were not maritime based. However, you are mistaken that they had a population issue. As a matter of fact, Tawantinsuyu (the Quechua name of the Inka Empire, meaning "the Fourfold Whole", roughly) did not have any famine, nor homelessness and, under the rule of the Sapa Inka, more land was cultivated in what is now Peru than is today. Furthermore, the planned economy of Tawantinsuyu and its magnificent infrastructure of paved roads, aqueducts and storehouses, the latter known as tampu, allowed its people to be essentially free from fear of starvation, as the tampu could always be opened up if there was a bad harvest and/or llama caravans used to bring in food. Indeed, the Inka government promised none would go hungry, a promise essentially kept throughout Tawantinsuyu's history thanks to the infrastructure described above and the fact that, unlike in a market economy, everyone was guaranteed food, clean water and a place to build a home.