Started reading Guns, Germ, and Steel, and debated about this with my friend. I do understand that Africa’s North/South orientation adds a lot of climate diversity, which makes it difficult for people to collaborate. To what extent did this actually affect Africa’s economic development? Like for example, are there other countries that may have pulled off thriving under this orientation, or is this a red herring to distract away from the serious impact of European colonization? I do understand this is not a simple question, but let’s try!
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Guns Germs and Steel has a whole lot of anthropologists who **hate** it – definitely search the book title or Jared Diamond on r/anthropology, I think you’ll find a number of detailed responses to questions like this.
Personally I don’t think that climate variations within Africa are a huge barrier to anything; there’s been a thriving trans-saharan trade route for a thousand+ years, tons of rivers in the Congo basin run north-south, and the climate of East Africa is pretty consistent from Kenya to South Africa. I think a bigger thing to point to is a lack of hyper-fertile areas for “civilization” as westerners think of it to grow. Africa happens to be a very old continent with no mountain ranges eroding down and adding minerals to the soil, and almost no volcanic activity. The biggest exception is the ethiopian highlands, which feed the Nile – and Ethiopia and Egypt have been densely populated, centralized civilizations for a really long time.
That said, it’s really problematic to talk like certain types of human organization are the “real” “proper” way for societies to be, and that other societies must have something preventing their development to that, and that you can point to a small number of huge factors that entirely explain it. That’s kind of the problem with Jared’s book; it compares civilizations in the New World and Africa against a European standard instead of understanding those civilizations on their own terms. Again, way better-written posts about it can be found over on the above subreddit.
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