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
Everyone here all about all sorts of shit, colonialism, corruption etc. And i’m not saying that that shit doesn’t happen or never happened or didn’t expedite the problem, but that isn’t the main reason, by any means.
There is one thing that all great powers throughout all of time had in common. All of them had waterways that they could exploit. There isn’t a single great power throughout history that didn’t have direct access to the sea’s, and this is something that Africa doesn’t have a lot of. Africa, as a continent it very ‘high’ in elevation. As in, most of Africa’s rivers go through massive drops before reaching the ocean/sea. This means that all trade has go through these obstacles before ever being able to reach any trading partners. The only river that doesn’t have this massive drop in elevation is the Nile, and that is precisely the one place in Africa that did have a large, outgoing civilization.
Ultimately this is the same reason why Irak waged war and why the Ukraine is at war right now. It is all about access to water in order to be able to export goods.
Africa’s rivers aren’t all that well suited for traversing upstream. There are too many drops, rapids and shallows for any big ship to traverse. This leaves them out of the trading loop regardless of their natural resources. It doesn’t matter if you hold all the resources in the world if there is no realistic way of exporting those goods. That is what has always happened to Africa. There are plenty of resources, but it is just no economic way of delving them because of the terrain that needs to be traversed.
Some cultures thrive, others don’t.
Africa hasn’t had a culture of scientific and technological pursuit that has allowed it to thrive and pursue industrialization the same way Europe has. And once you fall behind, all you can do is play catch-up. That’s why modern African states are simply relics of the colonial era where bribery and corruption run rampant and the resources are being pilfered by unscrupulous foreign companies.
> Africa has a lot of natural resources
People say it about every place, but it’s simply not true. Africa has few natural resources, poor agricultural potential, and extremely poor trading potential.
> why is Africa generally poor
Not so long ago, the whole world was very poor. Africa just stayed poor longer than other places.
[The first place in the whole world which stopped being poor was 1800s England](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrialisation). Since then the “not poor” area is getting bigger and bigger, mostly by trading with countries that are “not poor”. And mostly by sea.
Africa has very difficult time trading with anyone, as it has very little coastline. And it doesn’t have much stuff to trade with – it is very poor in natural resources, is importing rather than exporting food, and is too politically unstable to do mass cheap manufacturing like East Asian countries.
There are other very poor places just like Africa. Like Central Asia (Afghanistan, Tajikistan etc.), or Bolivia. It is same problem – difficult to trade, and no resources to trade with.
Africa can join the “not poor” world if:
* it builds infrastructure – ports, railroads – to trade with what it has
* it achieves enough political stability to let companies invest without civil war or terrorism blowing it all up
This is already happening, but slowly and unevenly.
(all this generally, there are some countries in Africa that did OK, a few have meaningful natural resources, or enough stability)
> The TseTse fly is unique to Africa and transmits a parasite harmful to humans and lethal to livestock. This paper tests the hypothesis that the TseTse reduced the ability of Africans to generate an agricultural surplus historically. Ethnic groups inhabiting TseTse-suitable areas were less likely to use domesticated animals and the plow, less likely to be politically centralized, and had a lower population density. These correlations are not found in the tropics outside of Africa, where the fly does not exist. The evidence suggests current economic performance is affected by the TseTse through the channel of precolonial political centralization.
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20130604
My question is, why despite all this, were Rhodesia and Apartheid South Africa the wealthiest countries on Africa?
So many tropical and parasitic diseases. Malaria, schistosomiasis, filariasis, etc., etc.
Illness and disability impair every aspect of personal and societal development, from agriculture and the ability to produce enough calories for adequate nutrition, to income acquisition, education and political stability.
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.
The reasons could never be fitted into an ELI5 answer in a good way, this is an absolutely huge topic with extremely many facets.
You couldn’t fit an adequate answer into a 5-page essay, let alone an ELI5 answer. Anything you will get here will be vastly inadequate and likely very biased/misinformed/one-sided opinions.
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