Why Africa is still poor? And why almost every country is poor?
In: 21
For many reasons, the most important is becouse welthy country wanted and want even today keep those country poor to have cheap resorce to harvest. Like, coal, gas, oil, diamons, salt and many more.
How they keep those country undeveloped? With geopolitic crisis and wars mostly.
Sometimes I see an ELI5 and realize there’s a lot of historic context to consider, which would not be served well by a simple, short paragraph. This is one of those times.
In essence, Africa still hasn’t recovered from its usurpation under the Ottoman Empire and the Colonial Slave Trade. It’s very tiring to continually hear about the slave trade but in Africa’s case, it’s effects were devastating, leading to wars and oppression which still impact its nations today.
19 of the worlds 20 poorest countries are in Africa. Historical evidence from case studies show how the slave trade caused political instability, weakened states, promoted political and social fragmentation, and resulted in a deterioration of domestic legal institutions. Between 1400 and 1900, the African continent experienced four simultaneous slave trades.
[Here is a video](https://youtu.be/TW46xDXNO3Q) which I’m including because this is a *very* complex topic with vast and detailed historical context to consider. I realize that’s not really an “ELI5” but it’s presentation is easy to understand and truly, it takes a little effort to grasp the enormity of circumstances that created African nations’ problems. The video addresses your question very well, so I hope it may explain things better than a simplistic response to a question that requires an in-depth answer.
Africa is a land very rich in resources but materially, very poor. This is clearly true. There is no single reason for this, but I would say that a system of imperial exploitation of Africa is probably the number one reason it is this way. While the system of explicit colonization is over, a system of neo-colonialism and debt slavery have replaced the old system of colonization and slavery.
In the 60s when lots of African countries fought wars for independence, or were “granted” independence, they were not able to get rid of their loans from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). This means that when they were finally able to “govern themselves”, they were saddled with massive amounts of debt. This seriously hurt their ability to develop their countries and provide social services. The IMF would allow restructuring of debt, but only if these countries adopt certain policies that are ameable to the “free market”, meaning foreign investment for pennies on the dollar, European and American companies buying up natural resource rights for relatively very cheap.
There is also the problem of corruption – there is a level of corruption that is very high in many of these countries. Corruption of course is not necessarily a result of colonization or neo-colonialism. However, it must be said that European and American intelligence agencies have meddled in the internal politics of a bunch of African countries.
Thomas Sankara, a revolutionary leader from Burkina Faso, gained power and began instituting massive reforms and had ambitions to creat a union of African states to act as an economic block. He enacted a policy of de-desertification and housing rights for the people and policies of anti-corruption. He was killed most likely with the help of French and American intelligence, as well as his old friend.
Kwame Nkrumah, a revolutionary leader of Ghana, actually wrote about this specifically in his book *Neocolonialism*. He too advocated for African Unity, and was also overthrown in a coup,, with the help of American intelligence.
In closing, there has been a very long war fought against Africa by the west. The vast resources available in Africa are coveted by the world. A system of colonialism, neo-colonialism, and debt slavery has been used as a bludgeon to keep africa poor while extracting/stealing as many resources as humanly possible.
You could actually look at South America and deduce the same thing. I’m sure there will be those around here who disagree with me though.
I know that’s not a short answer or even an uncomplicated answer, and I’m very sure I missed some stuff.
[removed]
[removed]
In part this is because after World War 2 during a time that Africa could join the world in sharing new technologies and building themselves up you simultaneously had African countries throwing off and essentially biting the hand that feeds them (Colonial powers like England, France and Germany) – only to then be turned into a proxy battleground for the Cold War – with USA and USSR in many cases supplying arms to different conflicting sides in each country.
Post Cold War you are left with an Africa that’s not nearly as well off that it can be with lots of weapons about in the hands of Warlords and no sign of USA or USSR coming to fix up the mess that they armed.
Another legacy of Colonialism and the creation of the UN is that country borders were drawn up and still today are being preserved by the European powers with almost no regard for the different tribal ethnicities.
But there comes a time where you can’t hang everything on the Europeans. Africa was backward technologically, tribal and often warlike with the practice of slavery firmly in place long before the Europeans ventured that way.
Jump to today and you now have Militant Islam spreading throughout Africa again arming and dividing countries. And also China buying their way in more and more and more. And China will be seeking to protect their investment in Africa in the future…
in part, bc it takes a lot of misery and suffering for each person who lives a life of relative comfort, enough food, shelter, and material possessions / stability to waste time on the internet asking questions and meta questions instead of attempting, at all possible moments, to improve their lot in life. It takes a lot of slaves in Chinese factories making every electronic product in the world, serfs in sweatshops in Asia and Africa, multi-generational impoverished immigrants working in fields, central American indentured servants working in car factories, and many many other impoverished ppls just so we can get a new item in two days via Amazon Prime rush delivery or drive to Walmart, Whole Foods, and/or Kroger and live our modern lives.
I’m not judging as the alternative seems to be everyone lives in squalor as if no one does these shit jobs for low/no pay, who is going to do them and how are we to afford modernity? But, the truth is, it takes a lot of suffering to sustain comfort (even the comfort of a lower class American)
We can express this in three phases.
Prior to the Age of Exploration, most of Africa was simply ‘backward’ – at least compared to the other major civilizations. Africa as a whole isn’t well structured for complex civilizations for a variety of reasons, but most notably because complex civilizations tend to be structured around waterways. Not only is most of Africa lacking in navigable waterways that can form the basis of agriculture, but it is lacking in protected ports.
Once the Age of Exploration kicked off, African civilizations came in contact with far wealthier and more productive European ones. This lead to a situation where the only trade good of any value from Africa was slaves. Ultimately, this meant that you had slave-based economies on the coast and the inland regions were destroyed by those slave-based economies.
Then the Europeans banned slavery.
This lead to the collapse of the coastal slave-based economies and the inland areas were already effectively ruined by centuries of slave-raiding.
When industrialized European discovered resources only useful for industrialized nations, they quickly moved to exploit these resources. However, they did so by importing all the expertise necessary build/maintain the infrastructure for exploiting those resources.
Now fast forward to the post-World War II era. The European nations are no longer able or willing to maintain their control over the region, so they turn it back over to the native governments. Unfortunately, those native governments were drawn from a populace that had barely advanced beyond the subsistence-level agriculture phase of technology. They had no ability to maintain the infrastructure they had, much less improve on it because they lacked the skilled laborers necessary.
To compound this, almost all such nations implemented highly restrictive across-the-board trade barriers with the rest of the world. So not only couldn’t they make anything domestically (due to lack of skills), they couldn’t even import foreign expertise in the form of goods.
This lead to dysfunctional economies run by strongmen who lined their own pockets by selling off natural resources. No one could challenge them because they were the only ones with any wealth to buy foreign goods – and you needed foreign goods if you were going to resist the strongmen.
The story of Congo is instructive here. The Belgians forbade any meaningful education there. Thus, when they left in 1960 and took essentially everything with them, there were only six trained physicians. In a nation of over 15 million people, covering an area of 1,330,000 square miles.
Clearly, the damage of the colonial period continues to reverberate around the continent.
The one contributing factor that comes to it is like everyone has said: Colonialism.
And even after it ended you have tribes who were okay with looking after themselves forced to be ‘one country’. Nigeria has over 200 tribes and now all of a sudden they are tasked to run a country, select a leader, create a new culture and also try and unlearn what their colonial masters had ingrained in them.
Latest Answers