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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You are talking about Africa as if it is one big country. It is not, rather it is a huge continent with lots of different empires and countries. But there are of course other north-south oriented continents. The biggest of them is America. And you kind of see some similarities in the way that different cultures developed sort of isolated in America just as in Africa. It is hard to get goods from Peru to Brazil by foot so there were not much cultural exchange, just like it is hard to get goods from Kenya to Congo. The US deserts between Sierra Nevada and the Rocky Mountains played a lot of the same role as the Sahara desert in dividing the cultures. What ties the cultures together, both in Africa and in America are river systems. You can easily transport goods by boat so even long before Europeans settled in the US there were pearls from Long Island being sold in the deep Amazon because they are connected through the rivers and internal oceans. Similarly the cultures along the Kongo follows the rivers. The Mediterranean countries have their own culture regardless of which continent they are on, similar with the countries around the Red Sea. The only exception to the rivers is an area of the Nile currently in South Sudan which is impassible, so lower and upper Nile have been culturally separated even though it is the same river.
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