Africa has a lot of natural resources but has always relied on foreign aid. Nonetheless has famine, poor road network, poor Healthcare etc. Please explain.
In: 2392
Colonisation mostly, but there are several reasons why colonisation was so destructive:
1) Africa was not agrarian, in most of the continent the population never quite exploded like in SA Asia, so the need for large cities didn’t exist. There was enough room for everyone so it evolved more slowly towards agriculture and that made their local economies vulnerable.
2) Africa has 3000 languages and it used to have more (because it was inhabited for much longer than anywhere else). It was a lot more divided than other continents because tribes were more prevalent than nations, which is why their current borders were drawn by Europeans in the 20th century. No large Empires were built other than the Mali or the Egyptian Empires and there were no formal armies to stop the Europeans.
3) Africa was kinda isolated, its climate was too hot for the Europeans to move there and malaria and dengue fever didn’t help, which is why it was colonised by Arabs in the 7-8th century, but that colonisation found real trouble moving south the Sahel. That limited a lot the scientific trade for at least half the continent and didn’t give them iron weapons until everyone else had them.
4) Africa had kinda an inertia towards not using writing or building with stone, both signs of civilization in the eyes of the rest of the world. They did have both things, but they looked more primitive at first sight.
5) West Africa lost entire generations of men of working age who were transported against their will to the Americas. They sold their own, and then they were invaded too.
Fun fact: the richest man to EVER exist, was an African black man: emperor Mansa Musa.
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