QUORA: Why is Africa so far behind the rest of the world? by John McKenzie, Answered Dec 12 As Thomas Sowell has pointed out, Africa is a large continent, yet has less coastline than Europe. Africa has no large navigable rivers. Europe is criss crossed by rivers, China has large and long ones. The Nile cannot handle large ships, and the Congo has large drops that limit passage to canoes in places. It takes less fuel to go from China to San Francisco than it does from San Francisco to St. Louis. Availability of sea transport is critical to movement of goods, people, but more importantly - knowledge. The modern world may have made these limitations less significant, but there?s a lot of catching up to do.
The history of Africa is a history of isolation from the wider world. It is about 10% of the world?s population yet has over 30% of the world?s languages - a sign of small groups not having extensive contact with each other. The more isolated you are, the less able you can take advantage of other?s learning and discoveries. You are forced in effect to discover everything by yourself, which is far slower than learning form others. You may never get enough critical mass to escape from a very simple existence, and all the problems that come from that.
The lack of development leaves you vulnerable to colonisation from others. Why though was America colonised by Europeans before Africa was even though it is much closer? Sowell suggests disease as a reason. We?ve seen that in our own time with HIV. ========================= EDIT: Since writing that answer I came across a short article of Sowell, so you may as well hear it from the great man himself:
Thomas Sowell: Geography and man have all but killed Africa
Nature and man have combined to make Africa the most tragic of the continents ? and the men who did this have been both black and white.
The great French historian Fernand Braudel said, "In understanding black Africa, geography is more important than history." Much of Africa's history was in fact shaped by its geography.
Almost every great city in the world has risen on navigable waterways ? and such waterways are more scarce in Africa than in any other continent. An aircraft carrier can dock on the Hudson River in midtown Manhattan, but there is not a single river where that is possible on the vast continent of Africa, which is larger than Europe or North America.
Even smaller boats can travel only a limited distance on most African rivers because of cascades and waterfalls. Most of the continent is more than 1,000 feet above sea level, and more than half of Africa is more than 2,000 feet above sea level. That means its rivers and streams must plunge down from those heights on their way to the sea.
Water transport was crucial in the thousands of years before there were trains or automobiles. It was crucial for developing an economy and crucial for developing a culture in touch with enough other widely scattered cultures to make use of advances in the rest of the world. But many African societies have been isolated by that continent's dearth of both navigable rivers and harbors.
Isolated regions have almost invariably lagged behind regions in touch with a wider cultural universe. One among many signs of the isolation and cultural fragmentation of much of sub-Saharan Africa is that African languages are one third of all the languages in the world, even though African peoples are only about 10 percent of the world's population.
Small, tribal societies were another consequence of geographic isolation ? and the vulnerability of such societies to conquest by outsiders was another.
If cultural diversity was all that the multiculturalists claim, Africa would be a heaven on Earth. Too often and in too many places it has been a hell on Earth.
Many people expected great things from Africa when new independent African nations began to emerge from colonial rule in the 1960s, often headed by leaders who had been educated in Europe and America.
Unfortunately, what these new leaders brought back to Africa from the West were not the things that had made the West prosperous and powerful but the untested theories of Western intellectuals and ideologues who had taught them. Such African leaders by and large lacked both the common sense of the African masses and the technological and economic experience of the West.
The net result was that African leaders, full of confidence because of their Western education and the adulation of the Western intelligentsia, made their people guinea pigs for half-baked theories that had contributed nothing to the rise of the West and had contributed much to its social degeneration.
Poverty-stricken Africa could afford these economic and social disasters far less than the affluent West could. However, African leaders were not judged in the West by their results but by their rhetoric and their visions that resonated with the rhetoric and the visions of the Western intelligentsia.
Thus Julius Nyerere became virtually a secular saint in the Western media while he was driving the people of Tanzania deeper into poverty and tyranny. Nor was he alone.
Conversely, when Felix Houphouet-Boigny made the Ivory Coast an oasis of economic advancement and civil peace, he was either ignored or disdained. He was one of the few new African leaders with any previous experience in business or any understanding of economics. His successors have ruined the country.
Whatever damage European colonialism did to Africa during its relatively brief reign, that was probably less than the damage done later by well-meaning Western would-be saviors of Africa. Africans do not need to be treated as mascots but as people whose own efforts, skills and initiatives need to be freed from the tyranny of their leaders and the paternalism of Western busybodies.
Born June 30, 1930 in Gastonia, NC Spouse(s): Alma Jean Parr (m. 1964; div. 1975), Mary Ash (m. 1981) Institutions: Cornell Univ, Brandeis Univ, Urban Institute, UCLA, Hoover Institution, Stanford Univ Field: Welfare economics, education, politics, history, race relations, child development School or tradition: Chicago school of economics Alma mater: Harvard (BA), Columbia (MA), Univ of Chicago (PhD) Influences: Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Adam Smith, Henry Hazlitt, Edmund Burke Awards: Francis Boyer Award, National Humanities Medal, Bradley Prize, Int'l Book Award Military career: Marine Corps, 1951?1953
Sowell was born in Gastonia, near the border with South Carolina. His father died shortly before he was born, & his mother, a housemaid, already had 4 children. A great-aunt & her two grown daughters adopted Sowell & raised him. In his autobiography, A Personal Odyssey, Sowell wrote that his childhood encounters with white people were so limited that he did not know that blond was a hair color. When Sowell was 9, his family moved from Charlotte to Harlem, NYC, as part of the Great Migration of African Americans from the South to the North for greater opportunities. He qualified for Stuyvesant High School, a prestigious academic high school in NYC; he was the first in his family to study beyond the sixth grade. However, he was forced to drop out at age 17 because of financial difficulties and problems in his home.
Sowell held a number of positions, including one at a machine shop and another as a delivery man for Western Union, & he tried out for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1948. He was drafted into the military in 1951, during the Korean War, & was assigned to the USMC. Because of his experience in photography, Sowell became a Marine Corps photographer.
After his discharge, Sowell worked a civil service job in Washington & attended night classes at Howard University, a historically black college. His high scores on the College Board exams & recommendations by two professors helped him gain admission to Harvard, where he graduated magna cum laude in 1958 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics. He earned a Master's degree from Columbia University the following year.
Sowell has said that he was a Marxist "during the decade of my 20s"; one of his earliest professional publications was a sympathetic examination of Marxist thought vs. Marxist?Leninist practice. His experience working as a federal government intern during the summer of 1960 caused him to reject Marxian economics in favor of free market economic theory. During his work, Sowell discovered an association between the rise of mandated minimum wages for workers in the sugar industry of Puerto Rico & the rise of unemployment in that industry. Studying the patterns led Sowell to theorize that the govt employees who administered the minimum wage law cared more about their own jobs than the plight of the poor.